Starting 2027, Mahindra & Mahindra (M&M) will roll out four new sports utility vehicles (SUVs), across petrol, diesel and electric powertrains, on a new global platform.
Nu.IQ, the new platform, will produce smallsized SUVs, complementing the relatively bigger platform INGLO that the company had unveiled a few years ago. The new platform allows M&M to have more products in the sub4 meter category.
Rajesh Jejurikar, executive director, M&M, said: “We can have an ICE (internal combustion engine) or a born EV (electric vehicle) from the same architecture which gives us huge fungibility by the way of mix of EV and ICE, because the platform is generated upfront to meet the global standard of safety and crash.”
The company is setting up 240,000 units a year capacity for the four new products at the Chakan plant in Pune, pushing the eventual capacity to 760,000 units a year.
“We have 56,500 per month on ICE and 8,000 on EV, of which 5,000 are operational and the rest will happen in the rest of the year. The expansion will add another 20,000 per month, which is fungible between ICE and EV,” Nalinikanth Gollagunta, CEOauto, M&M, said.
The automaker is also exploring a greenfield capacity beyond this.
The company did not specify the investment outlined for the said launches, but added that it is part of the FY25FY27 cycle, for which it had earlier announced a spending of Rs 27,000 crore. The products coming out of the Nu.IQ are part of this cycle.
On the Nu.IQ platform, the company is targeting developed global markets, including the UK. It will start with South Africa and Australia in the first phase as the company is already present in these markets.
“The second phase will be through the UK where we will be going with an EV first. The current generation EV will go to the UK also. The UK FTA is quite helpful. It gives us the opportunity to put our products there at lower tariff barriers. In phase 3, we will target markets beyond that,” Gollagunta added.
In South Africa, the company is building a semiknocked down facility (SKD) which could serve the entire African market. “The opportunity outside of India is two times the size of the Indian market,” Gollagunta added.
The company also confirmed that it is talking to the Maharashtra government for a 350acre site near Igatpuri. “We have submitted a letter of expression of interest to the Maharashtra government,” Jejurikar added.
Igatpuri is part of M&M’s ecosystem. The company has an engine plant in the region, while it has a vehiclemaking plant in Nashik. “We see this plot as a filler because both Nashik and Igatpuri are out of capacity. So, the new land could be used for setting up a supplier park and anything that we may need for Nashik or Igatpuri,” he added.
M&M is exploring various avenues beyond vacation ownership to broaden its presence in the travel and tourism sector, said CEO and MD Anish Shah.
The plans of the group’s hospitality arm, Mahindra Holidays & Resorts India, to have 10,000 rooms by 2030 is “conservative”, considering how domestic tourism has boomed in the country post Covid19 pandemic, Shah said in an interview with PTI Videos. “It (the target) should be much more. It is a good target right now, as a business looks at various options to go beyond vacation ownership…” he added.
