Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for being here today. Also, I welcome all those who are joining through webcast. Warm welcome to the Q3 FY 2023 presentation and analyst meet. Today, we have got... we have Dr. Anish Shah, MD and CEO, Mr. Rajesh Jejurikar, Executive Director, Auto and Farm Sectors, Mr. Manoj Bhat, Group CFO, joining us for the meet today. Also, we have the entire senior leadership team of Auto and Farm joining us today for the meet. With this, I hand over the podium to Dr. Anish Shah for his opening remarks and for the presentation.
Thank you, Sriram, good afternoon, and welcome, everyone. It's great to have you here with us in person again after many quarters of these online meetings. I'm glad we are starting to get back to normal. As you will see, we've had an excellent quarter once again. Key messages, strong operating performance at the standalone level. Q3 is up 52% before EI, which is more operational. Year-to-date is up 47%. At the consolidated level, continued strong performance there as well. Q3 up 35%, year-to-date up 76%. The gap will narrow a bit. This is driven by Mahindra Finance. As you know, last year, Mahindra Finance had INR 2,500 crores of provisions in the Q1. All of it came back in the next three quarters. Comparisons for the Q1 this year looked excellent.
For the next 3 quarters, they will look a little weaker, so year-to-date is the number we look at, and we will expect a fourth quarter co-comparison that will be lower than last year. You will see that 76% probably come down a bit. Finally, we made a number of commitments, and we will give an update on that. Happy to say that we've delivered on all the commitments that we made so far. On a standalone basis, revenue up, 41% for the quarter, 54% year-to-date. We talked about PAT before EI. Auto and Farm are both driving this very strong performance at the standalone level.
As we look at consolidated, Mahindra Finance actually has come in with strong results, that has helped increase the gains at the console level beyond what Auto and Farm has contributed. There, as we see, both in terms of PAT before EI and after EI, strong numbers. There are some numbers here after EI that we will be relooking at our accounting policy. For example, in what we've done consistently is gains in our Growth Gems are counted as EI. Mahindra Susten gain is INR 1,400 crores. That's counted as EI for us today. That's really not EI because that's what we planned for. We want our Growth Gems to continue creating value. That's what we're investing for.
We will be looking at the accounting policy and then making the appropriate changes as we go forward on that front. Which is why you see a much greater number, sort of post-EI there versus before EI. Our commitments, you've seen this slide before, at least on the left-hand side. The right-hand side is an update in terms of where we are, have been. We'd started with the path to ROE at 18%. happy to say that year-to-date this year, we are at 20.3%. Second, on EPS growth, we talked about a 15%-20% EPS growth. As you look at the numbers here, F 2021 to F 2022 is up 263%. On 2022 to 2023, actually year-to-date is higher than numbers shown here. This compares sort of 3 quarters versus 4 quarters.
We've got a robust EPS growth from a year-to-date basis this year as well. From a scale standpoint, we committed to driving scale in our core businesses as well as scaling up our Growth Gems. You're seeing that across the businesses today. We talked about auto margins being up 300 basis points in the medium term. We've actually achieved that faster than we had expected when we said that a year ago. Rajesh will talk about margins being up 320 basis points. We've delivered gains from the Susten deal. In addition to that, we sold some Kandivali land, which will help our life spaces businesses grow. Our logistics business has made a second acquisition in Rivigo, and it's positioning itself very well to really take advantage of the potential for logistics in India.
Lots of activities with regard to our Growth Gems as well. Finally, talk about leading ESG, something that's important for us. We've done a lot of things in this area, and happy to report a recognition that we've got the first and only Indian auto manufacturer to be in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index. That's just one of the many global recognitions that we are getting now. More important than the recognition is the work that we're doing to drive sustainability. With that, let me hand it over to Rajesh, talk about details on Auto and Farm.
Hi, good afternoon, everyone. Like Anish said, we've had a good quarter. I'll walk you through it. I'm sure you've gone through a lot of the numbers. I'm gonna be quick on them. For the Auto and Farm together, this was the highest ever revenue, 42% growth in the quarter. Highest ever PBIT of over INR 2,000 crore. Again, very huge, 64% growth.
For the farm, highest ever quarter three volumes, 14% growth. 1.6 share point gain in the quarter. Cumulative, YTD is a 0.9 gain in tractor market share. The auto highest ever quarter three volumes, 176,000, 45% growth, and continue to be number one in SUVs by revenue market share, with a gain of about 500 basis points, from last year quarter to 20.6%. Three-wheelers, highest ever volumes again and a continued market leadership of 63.5% market share. Very strong growth numbers as you can see both on revenue volumes and profits. These are the numbers that you've probably gone through earlier. You can see here the revenue went up 42% for the quarter stand alone.
The PBIT went up 64% with a very good split now between auto and farm. If you look back the previous quarter, you can see that it was really farm-led, but with auto turning around, you can now see auto and farm both contributing around the same number. Look at consolidated, I'll do this quickly. PBIT grew 62%. Now I'm going into the farm equipment. We expect the industry to grow over 10%. We've said a little over 5% last time. We wanted to watch. We've seen a very good 3 months, better than what we had expected. We were being cautious and conservative when we put out, saying it'll be in the region of 5% upwards, but we didn't expect it to be ending up where it is going right now.
At this point of time, we feel comfortable that it'll cross a 10% growth for the year. Many factors are enabling that. The two that we've seen change in the second half. One is an improved government spending in rural and agri. We were watching for that. That we see as a key factor. That's enabled growth. The monsoon is not new. The terms of trade with farmers have improved quite significantly. Especially we're seeing mandi prices of most crops, especially wheat, being much higher than the MSPs. That's enabling a much better return to farmers. The terms of trade are not back to the earlier levels, but they are much better than what we had anticipated. We're seeing that that is a key enabling factor. We often talk about tractor market volatility.
When you look at, and we always suggest don't look at 1 year or 1 quarter at a time. When you look at here, it's 9.5% CAGR, F 2020 to F 2023. You know about our market shares, but here is on the quarter we gained 1.6% and YTD it's a 0.9% gain. We are at 41%. Strong recovery on our market share over the last few quarters. Some key building blocks towards that. One key enabler has been the success of Yuvo Tech+. It's a significantly upgraded tractor launched at a very good price, contributes 15% of the total volumes right now. That's enabling a key enabler to growth. We've added 120 new dealer points YTD. Two key marketing campaigns have played out very well.
In 30 to 50 horsepower, which is, you know, 75%, 80% of the market, we've gained 1.7 share points. We've been talking about scaling up our farm machinery business. We believe there's a big upside here. We've spoken about how large the farm machinery market is globally compared to the tractor market and how India actually follows. It is the reverse in India. We've seen a 45% YTD growth in our farm machines already in this year. That is in spite of harvesters seeing a slow year this year. We expect that to start changing, and we have a plan to move to 10 x where we're gonna end up this year by the year 2027.
Multiple actions are in place, a new product pipeline, a lot of manufacturing in-house to a new plant in Pithampur in Madhya Pradesh. Rethinking our channel reach, channel access, and how we're gonna do that across different types of products. Of course, when I say global expansion here, it's exports from India. We've seen a good sequential improvement in farm equipment margins. As you can see, it's moved up from 15.7% to 16.6% over the last four quarters. With that, I'll move on to the automotive business. The chart on the left shows you domestic volume growth. The red graph is the SUVs and then you have the LCV less than 3.5 tons. Both have seen very strong growth.
That's enabled us to drive a revenue growth of 53%, last quarter to this quarter. This chart shows you market shares. You've heard a lot about the SUV market share, we don't talk so much about our LCV less than 3.5 ton market share. Seen a significant growth. If you want to normalize that curve, it's a five share point gain that we're seeing from the levels at which you were. It is a competitive segment, in this competitive segment, we've seen a very robust increase in our market shares there. Our strong booking pipeline in UVs continues. We on first February have an open booking of 266,000.
As we are reinforcing to every stakeholder, it's while we feel very good about the response that we're getting to every new launch, we do worry about the waiting time. It has come down somewhat, but it's not at a level at which either we are comfortable or our customers are comfortable. I'm just flagging this off because we think it's a very significant achievement, to get on a body-on-frame product like Scorpio and a 5-star NCAP rating. We believe is a very significant achievement by our product development teams. It does, as we're seeing, starting to influence brand choice. The overall endeavor that we made in the area of safety is playing out now in India as customers are becoming more conscious about safety ratings. We launched the Thar rear-wheel drive recently. It's done extremely well.
We went in with a very aggressive, as one may call it, price aimed to redefine the segment. The INR 9.99 lakhs was done with a view to take on the subcompact segment of SUVs because, you know, this product can then get into mainstream, and that's really what it's beginning to do. It's seen a very strong, robust booking in the few weeks since we've launched it. The XUV400 started off very well as well. We opened bookings on 26th of January. We've got to 15,000 bookings in 13 days. We had put out in the original press release that we will aim to do about 20,000 in the course of the first year. We're, at this point of time, happy with the response of 15,000 bookings.
We will, as some of you know, deliver the first XUV400 later this evening. Those of you who are in the room, I will be there, I hope to witness it. We have spoken about the trucks and buses portfolio, and I just want to reinforce that, you know, we have a very strong product portfolio. We've created a new platform in the ICV segment. We are seeing a very good traction in retail for the last few quarters, and we will see ourselves building on this further. We've, as you would have heard and read by now, taken a readjustment of the value of the assets of this business, and we believe that will set us up well for the future as well.
quickly at the auto financials, 196% growth over last year in auto profits to INR 990. What we had said medium term, and at least in my vocabulary, was not 4 quarters, but we've been able to deliver that sooner than we thought we would, and we're happy with that. Manoj asked the question, which I'm sure you will ask, what's next? not today. I've been able to convince Manoj that I'm not giving out new targets so soon. but you can see we have all the key enablers in place. a lot of work we're doing on efficiencies, costs, and all of that is playing out in improving our margins to what clearly is the best-in-class margin.
To summarize, it's the highest ever revenue, highest ever PBIT, sequential improvement in Farm margins, the 320 basis point margin improvement in Auto over the previous year. Strong improvement in Tractor market share. Auto SUV leadership continues and a very strong momentum on three-wheelers electric. With that, I'll hand over to Manoj. Thank you.
Thank you, Rajesh. Thank you, Rajesh. First of all, welcome. I'm sure many of you are staying back for the event, so we'll find some time to interact. I think many of the key points have been covered by Anish and, Rajesh. If you look at the numbers, clearly, Auto is driving the growth. From an EBITDA perspective, we are at 13% OPM during the quarter, and that's an improvement of 160 basis points. Both, I think while Auto is a standout performer, but even Farm has had a very, very healthy quarter. I think that's one thing in all the highest evers, I think we are missing the strong performance of the Farm segment. The other point on the EI element, I think we covered briefly.
During the quarter, we looked at the MTBD business. It was always a category C item where we had to evaluate. We completed that evaluation and looked at the future valuation of the business and compared it with the carrying value. We've taken a hit in the financials, which is to the tune of before tax is about INR 680 odd crores, and there's a tax benefit on that. What we have done for this representation is kind of equated it out, while in the numbers you might see something slightly different, because that tax benefit is also coming on account of the CI. I think the other thing to say is there are some compensating entries, so the net impact is lower, which you see here. From a consolidated perspective, two things to highlight here.
One is, I think Mahindra Finance had a very strong Q3 last year. If you go back, I think Q1 was a big provision, then we had strong reversals come through the year, we had committed that those reversal will happen in that year, we actually did better than what we committed. That is obviously, that kind of reversal cannot be a normal situation. We are seeing some impact of that on the group companies on from profit perspective. From a revenue perspective, I think it's a very steady growth in the group companies.
I think on this one, the only item I would like to point out additionally is, I think the exceptional item on account of the Mahindra Susten transaction and the accounting treatment is there's a gain on the sale plus a revaluation of our stake. So that's flowing through the numbers. If you think of it, there's a positive on account of Mahindra Susten and there's a negative on account of the Mahindra Truck and Bus Division. If you look at the number, it is a 35% growth, but that includes that benefit coming through from a Mahindra Susten perspective. A quick one on the group companies. One is, Tech Mahindra. I think from a revenue perspective, a 20% growth. Deal signings have been fairly steady at around $700 million. I think the key focus here is on margins.
The reason for that is, clearly, the manpower cost increases and inflation has impacted the cost structure and the passback to customers is going to probably take a longer time. That's something which there's a lot of focus on. If you look at Mahindra Finance, a very healthy disbursement growth, your GNPA is coming down to 5.9%. Pretty much I think the focus on collections as well as the focus on growing the business continues. The PAT is down, as I mentioned earlier. From a Growth Gems perspective, three listed entities. If you look at Logistics, I think the revenue is up 17%, largely driven by the strength of the auto sector. We had the Rivigo acquisition, as Anish mentioned.
I think the focus there is integrating that acquisition and making it profitable, because while we bought it, I think it was obviously a asset which was not profitable, and that's something we are turning around as we go along. From a hospitality perspective, very strong occupancy numbers in India. I think the customer additions have also come back to the pre-COVID levels. The one thing there is, because they had a forex impact, that's why you see a loss number there. I think there's one more impact I'll talk about from a forex perspective in our numbers. From a real estate perspective, the company continues to do very well. From a residential launches as well as residential sales as well as institutional sales, I think all three segments continue to do well.
I think that's something which will reflect in the numbers in the quarters going by and the years going by. This quarter, there was an exceptional gain, which has impacted pro-profits quite positively. After that, we are showing a 33% gain. In summary, I think if you look at the waterfall, I think two or three things. One is Auto & Farm is a big positive. Tech M&M, Mahindra Finance, I think the bulk of this drop, about INR 156 odd crores is coming from Mahindra Finance. I think I spoke a bit about the Growth Gems. On the investment side, it's largely forex-led again because we have a forex exposure in one of our subsidiaries, a forex loan exposure. That's been marked.
That's where you see that negative. Then the EI swing, which I explained. That's the kind of build-up from INR 1,987 to INR 2,677. With that, I think we have a small video to show you. Can we have the AV, please?
Who am I? I'm going to be buying what you're going to be making. I want to know you're making a better world. I'll give my money to the one who never robs the Earth. I'll spend my fortune on you if you promise to think of the less fortunate too.
I want to know you're making a more equal world.
I'll invest in your technology to put a man on Mars.
Wait, why can't it be a woman?
I'll click on your app. I'll walk into your shop.
As long as you're fair to the farmer and his crop.
I'm gonna be buying what you're gonna be making. If you make the world a little better too, no one will feel richer than you.
Right. With that, we open it up for questions. Yes, Kapil, go ahead. Gunjan after that.
Thank you, and congratulations on achieving most of the targets that we set out. My first question is to Rajesh. If I look at the SUV order book, you know, we are getting roughly about 50,000 a month kind of order inflow, and the wholesales have been closer to 30,000, 30,000-35,000 a month. We've also had the launch of XUV400 and the rear-wheel Thar. I would have expected the order book to increase a bit more, right? Just wanted some color on that from the point of view that we are going to 39,000 a month capacity and then 49,000 a month. How you are thinking about that?
Yeah. Kapil, multiple ways to try and explain that. One is, we have improved the deliveries a lot
In the current quarter. You know, as you deliver, you are going to... That's the benefit that we want, and which is why we keep saying we do want to bring down the order book. This kind of an order book is not good for market, it's not good for customer, it's not good for anybody. I mean, you know, it's nice to say we have 260,000 + orders, but that's not our desire. You know, I just wanna put it out here today. We will be happy if we can come next quarter and tell you we brought the order book down. There will be many customers who want to buy, who don't want to book a product now and say, "Okay, I'm gonna wait 12 months or 15 months," or whatever at that time.
If we want to get demand momentum, it's gonna happen as we bring the order book down. Firstly, I wouldn't think about, you know, the order book size going down as a cause of worry. I would see it as a sign of positivity, which means, hopefully we are doing better with way of deliveries, retail and so on. You know, if you say two quarters down the line, we should be at 260,000, I would not be happy with that situation. We have to bring the order book down. This is not a good situation to be in. I mean, if you're saying we have 260,000 orders for a monthly sale of 35,000, what is that? I mean, it's not a good situation, whether it's 30,000 or 40,000 or 45,000.
We have to bring the order book down. Customers are expecting that we are going to do that, right? There are many customers who come in and say, "No, this is not tenable anymore, you know, if you tell us it's going to take 8 months, 10 months," whatever. I'm not too worried about that. We still see a very strong momentum. A lot of the order book does get consumed as we are delivering, and we've delivered pretty well in the coming quarter. I wouldn't worry about that. You're right, if you do a very mathematical calculation, of course we've launched 2 new products, so there have been some orders. You know, some adjustment downward of fulfilling orders of existing products, while we've created some orders of new products.
That's also a cycle, right? Every time we bring in something new, that creates excitement, that will enlarge the order book. Really for products which are there, we really have to bring the order book down and bring down waiting period. I think we brought down waiting period by a month and a half or so right now, but that's not good enough.
Sure. Yeah,
Does that answer your question, Kapil, or?
to some extent, yeah, I mean, the math is still something... basically what I'm trying to understand, is there also a cancellation factor here?
Yeah. There is a cancellation, as we've said, from product to product between 5%-7%. I mean, that's the number that we've been talking about, and that number by and large holds out.
Okay.
We've said that earlier, too, and that holds out. In some products it may be at 10% but on an average, we would say it's 7%-8% cancellation.
Sure. Second, also wanted to know that now we are selling almost twice of what we were selling pre-COVID, right? How you're prep-- and the customers that we are having now are probably more premium customers as well, right? How you are preparing the network for higher volumes and more premium customers? Possibly this number will increase another 30%-40% if I look at the capacity plans, right? Just some color on both these aspects.
To your question, I would add a question on how are we preparing our network for selling electric.
Yeah
you know, we're realizing needs a very different selling skill because you're selling category. I mean, you know, we've been observing, I've been myself in some showrooms through the XUV400 process. The kind of questions customers are asking while they're making a decision on EV, we do have to be much better prepared by way of our dealerships being able to handle those questions. You know, what happens to battery end of life? You know, the multiple things that customers want to know, repairability, so on and so forth. You know, I'm just adding to your question to say yes, as our customers get more premium, I think the volume part I'm not so concerned about.
You know, dealers when they see volume and they see money, then they figure, most of our dealers figure ways to bring capital in. I'm not really worried about the volume increase. We've also expanded our network in all the metros where a lot of the growth has come in from. I think from a ability to handle volume point of view, we've filled in all the gaps, especially in metros, we've expanded network. The critical task ahead of us is really the skill up gradation and how well we are able to play out story, the sales story or the experience story for especially our category of customers are extremely passionate. There's a lot we are doing around it, but I think we have a long way to go as well.
Okay. Any more details you can give? Like what exactly you are doing and also on network, any numbers you have, how much it is, how much we want to expand?
Veejay, you wanna take it?
I think one important thing I would just want to say is that, you know, as we are expanding the channel, we are very, very mindful and conscious that we don't want to overinvest the dealers in large infrastructure. Because the whole purchase model and the consumer journey is very fluid and it's changing, and we believe in the electric era it'll change even more. What we've done is we've actually created a concept, what we call the Cube. Last year or YTD, we have done about 130 Cubes across the country.
The whole idea is, I'll come to the rural, but on the urban side, we've done about 130 Cube where high traffic locations, we set up 800-1,200 sq ft location, 1 maximum 2 vehicle parking, couple of test drive vehicles, high on digital for customer engagement. That's worked very, very well because the ROI or let's say the ROC from a dealer perspective, it's very, very good on business case. As far as rural is concerned, we've opened about 220 touchpoints across the country. Doesn't sound like a very large number, but looking at penetration for now, I think 220 is the kind of number we were gunning for. We'll probably get to about 350 by the end of the year.
Veejay, you wanna talk anything on skill up gradation, the boot camps that we do and...
Yeah. Okay. Just on customer experience. Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, the whole idea of Cube is a very different customer experience. You typically would not. For example, we've done a lot by using Salesforce as a platform on which we are creating the omni-channel journey so that when the customer kind of walks into these places, the consultant already has a lot of information about the customer. In the sense which model, which variant, what has been the contact with the call center, what has been the last conversation of the consultant with the customer. A lot of it is in place. Some of it is still WIP. That's the whole approach towards consumer journey. That's one side, you know, of building capability. That is, how do we get our consultants to be more friendly in terms of interacting with the customer from information available?
Second is, when the customers walk in these days, the kind of questions they ask is absolutely different. Nobody wants to know power, torque, dimension. That homework's already done, comparisons are already done. They come in with very particular questions. What we've done this time around with the last three launches is we actually do what we call a boot camp, which is live with the product. We get sales consultants from our dealerships to a mother location, which let's say is Chakan for some of our previous launches, or it could be Nasik. We get them to stay there for like a week, 10 days. They immerse in the product. We bring in subject matter experts on technology because all our vehicles, these are very high on technology. That's again, a different way in which we are building capability.
A lot of that we've done with XUV400, as Rajesh also alluded to that. Consumers want to know about battery, they want to know. I mean, there was a very interesting question one customer asked in the showroom. When you try and explain this is an electric vehicle, so the customer said, "Is this a toy car?
Yeah.
Who could imagine a customer walking into a showroom and asking a question like this, right? I think there's a lot we are learning, and there's a lot that we are doing in terms of the way in which we are building our capabilities.
Anish, you want to add?
Kapil, just to add to that, technology is gonna change the game. Veejay, if you can just talk about Metaverse and how we're using that.
Yeah.
You may not need dealers to do everything in this case. Go ahead.
So far what we've done on the Metaverse is just building blocks. Right now, the website is on the whole 400 experience is a Metaverse experience, which is on two dimensions on a screen in front of you on your laptop, phone. What we are now moving to is an immersive experience at two levels. One is when the consumer will walk in through a VR gear. We'll give a very, very different experience, including a test drive. We're looking at simulators as an option and even hologram, holography as an opportunity going forward in terms of the immersive experience we will give. We are really leveraging on all the new age technologies in terms of the immersive experience we'll be able to give customers, including test drives. Thank you.
Kapil, we gave a very long answer.
Yeah, sorry about that.
We normally don't get questions like this, so-.
I like that.
We normally don't get questions like this.
Well, actually, I'm.
We're happy when we get questions like this.
Yeah. I'm glad that, you know, this is a non-financial question.
Gunjan, I think you want.
Thanks for taking my questions. I, just keeping the discussion on the UVs. There is a lot of chat around the regulations, right? There are two RDE as well as CAFE. I know RDE, you all had spoken about INR 9,000-INR 15,000 sort of increase. Maybe, you know, just a refresh on that. Is the number still the same as we're getting closer to the deadline? Also, are there any models which could entail a higher cost increase because some of the products didn't go through a launch recently. Maybe RDE and also on CAFE norms, again, where we stand in terms of the target CO2 emission. Does it mean we should be worrying about any penalties for FY 2023?
Yeah. We're by and large on that target, because there are some models which will go up to 20,000-22,000. That's the range. By and large in the region of the cost that we told you. On CAFE, we've done a lot on our ICE portfolio to be optimized, we don't see any penalty at this point of time coming out of CAFE with the launch of the 400, which will bridge any gap that may be needed.
Okay.
We are comfortable in all scenarios.
Including the XUV400 deliveries that you'll do in February and March.
That's part of it. I'm just saying with whatever that's planned to be sold now of XUV400 between February and March, we are confident that in any scenario of regulation that the government may have or any scenario of penalty which they have not been able to finalize, we'll be okay.
Okay. Got it. Just shifting the discussion to tractors now. You know, looking at the margins for this quarter, you know, this was clearly a good quarter from a operating leverage perspective. We did see steel benefit also flowing through. The margin expansion isn't as meaningful. Just wondering, you know, directionally, is it because, you know, we don't want to take significant price increases, you know, we will relook the range from a next 12, 18 months perspective? I mean, how should we think about the margins there? Also from an outlook perspective, you know, you yourself mentioned 9% CAGR, this tends to be cyclical industry.
How, you know, F 2024, does it mean from a demanding base, you know, we could see industry sort of plateauing out? There's also El Niño risk, which, you know, which potentially can be a risk to monsoons as well. Some color on the tractor business.
Yes. I'll take that as two questions. One is tractor margin and how does one read that and interpret that. The second is around next year. Second one is easier to answer because I'm not going to answer it. No, it typically is a little early to put out a tractor forecast for the next year. We also wait to see what happens in the last few months, and then we wait to see what's the latest that's coming out on the monsoon forecast, you know. We've seen 4 years of normal monsoon, which has never happened before. We've got to factor all of that in. We'll wait a little bit to see where this year ends up before deciding what's going to happen next year.
Irrespective of the growth of next year, I think what we have to keep in mind is 900,000+ is a very robust industry size. There's hence, you know, lot that. It's not a small size. You may, on that size of industry, see 1 or 2 years of low growth, and that's part of the cyclicity, we just need to factor that in mind. On the first question on tractor margins, we've passed on all the material cost now, right? As we've been saying in the past, the impact of not passing on the margin on material cost has a big impact on margins as a percentage. We've passed on all the material costs that have happened through the commodity cycle.
The reductions that are happening in commodity prices is having a decimal impact on margin right now. That's not large enough to offset the very big impact of margin not passed on material cost over almost a 2-year period, right? It's like, I think in the order of magnitude of 80,000, we've taken price increases of INR 80,000 in 2 years. It's a lot. When you're taking that kind of an increase in material cost and not passing the margin in a high margin business, it has like, I think, a 4 odd percent impact just not passing on the margin. If you had passed on margin on the material cost increase, our margin would have been higher by 4 odd percent. That's roughly our guesstimate.
That's really the gap that you have to keep in mind, right? When we are saying we are in the region of 16.5%, 17%, if you didn't have the effect of margin not passed on, that would have been 20%+. Which is why you're seeing a robust profit impact, but it doesn't show as a percentage margin right now. I don't think that percentage margin will easily come back to that level till we see a significant decline in commodity, because that's when you are not dropping prices as fast as the commodity prices are dropping, right? Just as you see a lag when the commodity price is going up, that you're not able to pass on as quickly, here you don't pass off as quickly as the commodity price is dropping.
That's when you start getting the benefit of the margin. I think we'll have to wait a little bit to be able to recover the margin not passed on. From a material cost, we've passed on everything now.
Okay. Bulk of the reset in the steel contracts is already reflected in this quarter. There's no tailwind that necessarily flows through in quarter four from steel easing that we saw.
Sorry, from what part? I'm...
Bulk of the steel easing is already reflected in this quarter. There's no tailwind that we should expect going into quarter four, right?
Yeah.
That reset is already reflected.
Yeah.
Okay.
Hi, this is Hitesh from CLSA. My question is just continuing on this discussion tractors. Actually, first is on the TREM IV norms. We have seen a substantial price increase which has happened on the 50 HP plus tractors because of the TREM IV norms, you know, getting implemented on the 50 HP plus tractors. Your competitor is talking about that the norms for the less than 50 HP will get postponed to, you know, FY 2025. Any, you know, color you can give us on that or how the government is thinking on that?
Hemant, do you want to comment? Hemant is also the president of TMA, maybe you want to just wear that hat, Hemant.
The TREM V currently applies to only 50 HP and above tractor. That has got implemented from 1st of January, and we have made the switch on that. Coming to tractors which are between 50 and 25 HP, which will form bulk of the industry and that was to happen 12 months from now, most likely, it would get delayed because there has not been any instance where when the TREM IV has got so much delayed, the TREM V cannot hold its timeline. We need a minimum changeover period of 4 years. TMA is talking to the ministry, and we have put up our case, and right now it is an active discussion. Mostly in our discussion, we have found them to be hearing, listening to our concerns, but right now, no decision has been taken.
As TMA, we are in continuous engagement with the government to see that they follow the norms what globally everybody has followed, which is usually a four to five year time period between one TREM to another TREM. That's what it is doing there. If you ask me my personal view, even FY 2025 seems to be very early.
Okay, maybe-
I just also had a question on the tractor margins, if Manoj can give us more granularity. Basically, I think steel contracts have got revised quite substantially, and we've seen that in commercial vehicles, you know, margins and, but I think it's happening more at the panel and not at the component level. When do we see that coming down in the component level? Because at some point in time, steel prices should come down there as well, right? What is happening exactly, if you can...
Hitesh, I don't think I'll add much to what has been said. From our perspective, I think the reasons are known. I think the commodity price cycle we are watching closely because China opening up, like it or not, is going to be a factor.
Across the board. You also know that there's a lag effect. I think, while it's our endeavor to be operating at the highest margins possible and which we are trying to do, but I think some of these conditions I will refrain from kind of giving a view on where the margins will head. Having said that, as we have demonstrated in the past, I think the goal is to improve margins. That's some... There will be certain pulls and pressures sometimes for short term. As we said last time, 300 basis points, 4 quarters back, I think we have reached the numbers earlier than we thought. That's something which we'll continue. I don't wanna go into the specifics of which quarter what will happen. Yeah. Thank you.
Also, I think on the commercial vehicle, you're seeing a much greater operating leverage kick in compared to tractors. I don't think it's comparable right now because commercial vehicles have gone through a huge industry downcycle. And that's an industry driven with very high operating leverage like tractors, right? When you see a big volume upswing, you'll suddenly see margins go up. That's what's happening in the CV market. That's not comparable to tractors right now because a 10%, 12% growth is not giving that kind of operating leverage that you're seeing in CV. I really don't think you should compare what's happening to CV margin connecting that with steel contracts. I think it's just My sense is it's more operating leverage right now.
Hi, this is Amyn from JP Morgan. Two questions from my side. First question is actually on the light commercial vehicles. We are seeing that in the sub 2 tonne category, the volumes have already started to show some weakness, whereas the 2 to 3.5 tonne where you are more dominant is still strong. My question was that do you think that this weakness in the lower category is just a precursor of some issues in demand, or is it specific to that category and you don't see, you know, this playing out in the whole segment?
I think that's a fair observation, something we're watching closely. You know, there are segments in the economy that are gonna be more price sensitive driven and the less than 2 tonne LCV, I would put it in that category as same as small sized passenger vehicles. These are segments which are seeing, you know, pressure, inflationary pressure, so on and so forth. I think it's too early to say that that's a stress point, but that's something that we would watch closely for. I think anything, any segment right now which is extremely price sensitive we have to watch for. Fortunately on the SUV side, we are not in that space too much. The LCV less than 2 tonne could be in that space. We're not seeing that in last mile mobility electric.
That's the dichotomy because there we are seeing very good momentum maybe because cost of ownership, e-commerce growth, all of that is enabling that, whereas the less than two tonne LCV segment doesn't have that much e-commerce momentum. Maybe that's one differentiating factor that's more dependent on stands and fleet of open market, you know, stand operators as they're called. But it's something I think it's a fair point and something we would watch closely for.
Okay. Okay. Thank you. Second question for Anish. You know, we have met or surpassed most of the medium term group targets that you were talking about. I think even Mahindra Finance is now at 16% ROE, which I think among the large listed names was in the B category, maybe going towards A. As we look to the next one to two years, will it be more about consolidation or do you think it's time to up the targets?
Time to up the targets.
Okay. Any numbers you would like to share right now or?
Okay. Let me give you a little more thoughts on that. I'm not gonna give you numbers right now, but I'll give you thoughts on it at least. You're right, we've made commitments delivered. I'm hoping it's more than most, but close to almost everything we've said. We've talked about the four large businesses, and we said they need to be on track and grow at a very significant pace and generate high growth from specific opportunities there. Farm machinery you saw was a specific opportunity generating high growth. In auto, breaking out last mile mobility is a significant growth area for us. And you will see that as we go forward as well as to the level of aggressiveness that we have there.
We really want to be number one in that space despite big competitors and we will find ways to get there. Beyond that EV is a growth area and in general, auto product has taken it to a great level. Mahindra Finance, you're right, is I would say halfway through the turnaround right now, not completely there. We've talked about a two-year turnaround plan. We've gone through the first year and we talked about asset quality. Asset quality today, stage three is less than 6%, 5.9%. Net NPA is 2.5%. We want to be able to demonstrate that in any economic downturn, stage three will not go more than 8%.
Now, that number may change slightly based on what we are, our final analysis shows, but the set of actions that we've talked about there will enable that to happen. It's about changes in some policies, changes in bringing in diversification in products, going after the rural affluent. You're getting products where you have a much lower inherent NPA, which we didn't have because if you look at our GNPA and compare them with any of the NBFCs or banks in that segment we play in, we are better than them. We've been better even in the downturns. The problem is we were only in that segment. We showed a 16% GNPA during a downturn, whereas others had enough things to buffer them, which we did not. That was one part of it. The second part was technology and data.
A lot of work and progress done on that. The third was really bringing in a very strong team, and that's something that we have done. There is not just the new CEO who we've announced, but the next level of leadership team also has come in from various large banks in the country and technology houses and so on. That entire turnaround is on track. You're seeing the results. You will continue to see more results there. Tech M we need to do a little more. There's still a lot more to be done on margins in Tech M. You will start seeing more of that, but we are sort of little behind on Tech M as compared to Mahindra Finance. These are the four large plays. Growth Gems we've talked about.
We are on track there. We are seeing good progress across the Growth Gems. The next thing we're going to look at is something much bigger. It's going to be in an area where we can truly add value. We're going to be very selective about where we go there. It may be in a related industry out of what we do right now. It may be taking one of our businesses and scaling it up much further. We are starting to think about that because we've generated a lot of cash from our investments, as we call it, from group companies. We are staying firm with saying Auto and Farm cash will not be used for investments. We've said that before, we're saying that again. We will stay with that.
If we have excess auto and farm cash, we will give it back to investors. Where we've generated a lot of cash from investments, we feel we can put that in, and where we can grow much faster than market, we will. That is our philosophy. As we have more numbers on that, we'll come up with it, but we are upping the game.
Yeah. Hi.
Hi.
this is. Sorry, can I go ahead?
Yes.
Okay. Hi, this is Yogesh from HSBC. Anish, just wanted to follow up on your comment on Tech Mahindra. This is your largest associate and most contributing to SOTP from our perspective. The company has performed below par for few years now. While it makes 20% ROE, which is your threshold, the board seems to be very tolerant in the last few years. Just wondering, is there a thought process to do some restructuring or are you happy with 20% ROE? Within the sector, that's the lowest ROE now and it's been quite volatile last few years. Thanks.
Tolerant is not a word we are using too much, as you will see. There is room for growth. Let me also highlight some of the pluses that Tech Mahindra has achieved. In terms of new account wins for large accounts, it's actually done very well. As you would compare it with its larger peers as well, it actually has done much better on that count, depending on how you see it. It has been able to penetrate new segments. Where telecom had been the mainstay in the past, financial services, healthcare, there are many large accounts who've come in and seen the value that Tech M has to offer there. It continues to be one of the leaders from a customer standpoint with regard to being able to solve customer problems and be flexible and nimble and agile in doing that.
There are many pluses there. There are areas where there is scope for improvement, and I won't go into detail right now. I will leave that to a sort of Tech M analyst meet for that. There are areas of improvement there, and I think some of them have been mentioned in those, in that call as well. The net result has to be a higher margin and therefore a higher ROE. The answer is, are we happy with the 20% ROE and the current margin? No, we are not. What is the plan to get there? We will talk more about it as we go on.
We are in the middle of a CEO succession plan as well, that's something that we want to make sure that that is completed first before we go out with a detailed sort of plan. That may also be a 1 or 2-year turnaround, similar to what we've done with Mahindra Finance. All I can say what the succession is, it's being done in a very structured, very thoughtful manner. The board is leading that, we will make sure that it is done very smoothly as we've done when I came in, as we've done with Mahindra Finance. We're ensuring that in Tech M as well, we will have a very smooth succession as we go forward. As that happens, we will come back with more on it, on Tech M.
Fair enough. Thanks.
Yeah. Hi. This is a question to Rajesh. This is regard to the EV pricing or the competitive in-intensity on the EV pricing. Definitely the competition is surprised by the price which you brought, and there is some pricing actions taken in the marketplace. I wanted to understand your thoughts in terms of pricing your product, considering you brought a superior battery technology. Isn't it much of a space available there to price your products easily to get the market share which you require? Or you feel it's still a very nascent market and hence the aggression can still play out?
I think the first part of your statement was a comment, so I'll just take that as noted. The second part I think is the question, which is, how much room is there for growth and what's the right price at which growth can come? I'm reading that as the question. Would that be about right?
Yeah, the market size or the opportunity. Is it very small that you need to fight on the pricing?
You know, my experience with pricing is you know whether it's right or wrong only after it's done. It's, before the event, you never know whether you got it right or not. It's only when you've done it that you realize that did you really mess it up or did you get it right? Our inclination is to make sure we get it right, and then there's enough room to recoup as you go along, even if you underpriced it. In the EV story, you know, as we've spoken about in the earlier conversation around customer experience and so on, I right now don't think it's a pricing. Pricing is the key factor here.
It's more about selling the category and getting customers to understand the category benefit, and the barriers to change, including, you know, how do you get charging set up in your society? Will you get permission, not? You know, there are multiple sets of questions people have. My sense right now is that for the category of customers coming in with the penetration in the C segment, as we've said earlier, is like less than 1% C SUVs, and in the B is 2.5%. That's the electric category penetration right now. There's enough headroom, but it's going to need very good overcoming of entry barriers from a customer standpoint. Really that has to be the focus. The question is, could we have launched it at a slightly higher price?
Maybe the answer is, yeah, it could have, and it wouldn't have made much of a difference. As we had also announced that this entry price was for 5,000 + 5,000, 10,000 numbers for the two variants. We would be moving to a higher price point, which we haven't announced yet.
Related to the EV business again, since it's almost like 4, 5 months the Born EVs have been displayed, what's the progress in terms of technology, what you want to bring there or the supply chain? What you want to change with the types globally, which you are trying to do there? That's one. Second, looking at your own journey through the acquisition of EV products and now launching XUV400 and the Born Electric, where you are trying to experiment more outside world than the in-house capability being built, is there anything like a early mover advantage in EV business or it's more about how quickly you learn and learn the ecosystem?
The first part of the question is how are we progressing on what we announced in August last year in Banbury. So far we are progressing well. We are on target dates and, you know, we had put out a set of things that we need to get done by this time. We are on track. Actually, we're building one of the protos about now. We're at a very, very good stage, but we are progressing on the dates that we've put out. At this point of time, we don't see any risk to the timelines that we had put out for the three products that we had said will be the. If you remember, we had put out five products. We had said one was a concept, three have been kicked off, and one was WIP from a kickoff place.
Three which we had kicked off are on schedule. There's some work happening on closing out on the one which was a BE.07 and the BE.09, which was a concept car. We are again at some advanced stage on what to do around that. Overall, we are directionally on the path, you know, to meet the timelines that we had put out. We feel one of the great values of partnership in this space is not just around technology, but a vertically integrated supply chain. In the next four to five years, supply chain of EVs is going to be one of the key success factors and the right costs.
That's where we feel we'll get the greatest value of the Volkswagen partnership, because they're investing a lot and they have a fully integrated supply chain all the way down to the mine. That's the part that we feel comfortable with from a fortification standpoint. There are multiple new technologies, as you rightly pointed out, that we had spoken about, and we are actually on track to creating a very, very good advanced tech product. What will an early mover advantage really play a huge role? I don't think so. Technology is evolving so quickly that if you've come in too early and locked into the wrong technology, you're going to. That's not gonna help, you know? It's, it's better at this stage for, you know...
I think we've conceptualized our new portfolio at a time when we were able to take in most of the new technologies that are coming in, and we are really creating something future-ready because we really believe the category explosion will happen around 2024, 2025. We don't think early mover advantage is a really critical thing in this game. I You had many questions. I hope I've covered most of them.
I'll just add to the early mover advantage. In this industry, there is no advantage in that sense. I mean, even we'll come out with 5 new Born Electric products. We're very confident we will take leadership in there. We will not be able to maintain that leadership if we don't keep coming up with a good set of products. Because this is just a powertrain. The consumer is going to look for design, it's going to look for other features in the car, it's going to look for pricing, all of those factors that come into play. If you look back at the history, at one point we had a 55% market share in SUVs. We lost that because we had others come in with much better products, etcetera.
We had to change our game, come in with a much stronger set of products, we've gained back a good amount of market share over the last two or three years, we still have sort of some way to go on that. We have to stay on our toes in this space. Someone's going to come in with a better product or a better set of products and eat your lunch if you're not ready for it. We really don't see, you know, any scope for complacency or any advantage, not just at the early mover, but even at the next level. You've got to continually be able to do that.
There are a couple of questions from the online. There's one question from Chandramouli Muthiah of Goldman Sachs. The question is, your tractor peers have been calling out down trading and commodity cost pressures. You seem to be managing these operational trends pretty well. Your tractor industry volume guidance also seems to be heading higher over the past couple of quarters. What are some of the things you are doing differently in this space?
Would it have been possible, Sriram, to have asked this question earlier to some of the other questions on tractor margin?
I was waiting.
I'm glad someone thinks we are managing tractor margin well. Thanks, Chandramouli, for that. We have been taking aggressive price increases. I think what we have to keep in mind is that we've gained market share while doing that. You know, when you are at the kind of market share where we are, to gain a 0.9% YTD market share or 1.6% in the quarter is a pretty substantial gain in market share. We always manage the trade-off between margins and market share, and that's the hardest part of the tractor game.
It's very easy in our position to say, "Okay, let's just go and increase margins." We know that that's a very dangerous game to play, and it's very easy to take 1% or 2% margin increase right now and then lose competitive advantage and go into a declining market share. That's not something we will do. Neither will we throw money away to get, you know, market share, buy market share, but neither will we let the reverse happen. Neither will we change, chase margins blindly to in a way that we are going to erode our market share or market position. That's the trade-off I think Hemant and team have managed really well, which is use products and technology. The XUV tech is a great example.
It was a derivative of the XUV product, but brought costs down significantly by retaining what customers really value. Now the premium of XUV tech over our traditional H one platform, as we call it, is very affordable for customers to move up. That's why we're seeing 15% of the volume come from there. With that, we've been able to bring in key, several key technologies to customers at a much more affordable price than what we were able to do with the XUV that we had originally. So I think that's been one key, one key element, which is the delivery of the product strategy. There are many new things that Hemant and team are doing around introducing newer digital technologies, IoTs, and you'll hear more about that as we go along.
We would want to lead the product curve, in a manner speaking, try and decommoditize the category, with through product differentiation. Sriram, I think that would be one area we'll kind of focus on saying what we've done well. We've taken price increases appropriately at the right time, apart from everything else, so.
Just one thing I'll add on tractor margin. I think it came up, but I'll just emphasize it. We've talked before that farm machinery will have a negative impact on tractor margins. We've talked about farm machinery going 10x by 2027. We want to do that aggressively. We will accept low margins on farm machinery for the next 5 years. As it grows, at the margin, it will have some impact on tractor margins.
FES margin.
Sorry, on farm margins, not tractor margins. Sorry. On FES margins. We will look at breaking it out soon as it becomes material enough so that we can start separating tractor margins versus farm machinery margins to look at overall FES margins. What you see today is some negative impact coming from a growth in farm machinery as well.
Another question from Chandramouli was in terms of Scorpio number falling from 130K to 119K. That's a backlog. Is it only because of the production backlogs or production issues or any other factors involved?
I think we spoke about that earlier, and yes, there has been a 10% cancellation on that.
Yeah.
Um-
Okay.
Some of the cancellation has been on models. You know, in the case, unlike XUV700, I just to clarify this, the learning out of XUV700 is we got a very high % of high-end, which was completely what we were not prepared for. In Scorpio N, we basically said, "Let's prioritize the Z8," which is the Z8L, right? We call it Z8L, which is the highest version of Scorpio N first. We've actually only produced that for the first two and a half, three months. We've cleared a lot of that waiting period because we just produced the high-end. In the process of that, what's happened is the people who booked some of the lower-end versions, then their wait time has gone up beyond the comfort zone.
We have had some cancellations around that. As soon as we start the production of that, which will be around now, towards the end of February, we'd expect that momentum to come back. Also you have to keep in mind that we have a very strong demand for Scorpio Classic, way beyond what we were selling earlier. That product is just going through the roof at the moment.
Okay. There's 1 question from Kishore of Cholamandalam Finance, Cholamandalam MS. The question is, the company has provided for INR 628 crore as impairment for certain long-term investment in Q3. In Q2, this was INR 248 crore. I think it's calculated the last 7 quarters. It's about INR 1,126 crore or 11% of the last 7 quarter PAT. When is this provision for impairment will stop?
Answer to that is very soon. A longer answer to that is we have been open about where it's coming from, which is all the category C companies. PMTC glad to announce that the transaction is closed. Last time we talked about it being signed. 31st March it was closed, so PMTC is out. That is an impairment.
31st January.
Will come as of 31st January. You will see that in the Q4 numbers. That's the one factor that will come in. Trucks and Buses was category C as well, and we talked about that briefly. That is what has resulted in the impairment in this quarter. Prior to that, everything else in category C that we took care of was the future impairments. The question is, what's left now, right? Now we effectively have Automobili Pininfarina left, as one that we haven't got completely back on track. All the farm businesses, the global businesses are actually doing very well, are on track. We've been reporting good profit numbers for them. On the auto side, the ones that we had to take care of, we've taken care of.
Outside the auto side, we've taken care of everything else. I think it's APF, it may be something else small after that. I mean, there's hardly anything left in category C at this point in time.
One clarification is APF, we are not having any carrying value today. From a P&L impact, it's probably not going to be a material impact. I think from a business turnaround is what we are focused on. Just a quick clarification on APF.
One last question from online before-
No.
-going there. Okay, this is from Jinesh Gandhi of Motilal Oswal. Is there any change in the SUV launch pipeline? There was some teaser from Mr. Bose on launch of CY 2023. That's one question.
I didn't understand. Can you clarify more?
Another question. Is there any change in SUV launch pipeline? There was some teaser from Pratap on launching
Launch pipeline?
Yeah. SUV new product launch.
No. I'll have to check what Pratap has tweeted, but...
Okay. Can you talk about how many markets are you present with Treo? What are the plans to launch in key markets? What is the plan to ramp up capacities in F 2024?
How many markets? I'm guessing within India, that's the question, right?
Yeah.
We're well represented. It's a well-distributed product. All our key dealers have it. We have separate dealers as well for last mile mobility products. It's reasonably well distributed. Veejay, you would have a number? Maybe like 400 dealers I think are selling it right now. 330 or whatever dealers. That we would maybe add another 100, 150 as we go along. We see, like Anish said, you know, the last mile mobility business is one where we see a huge opportunity for growth as we go forward. Very proven cost of ownership benefit to customers there. That's the reason we are seeing a very good penetration. That's a business in which we are investing towards growth, creating new product pipeline. Some of you may have announced that we...
read that we announced the MOU with Telangana government yesterday to invest in a new expansion of our current Hyderabad plant there to make electric vehicles. We are planning a good cycle of growth there, and we see a lot of positives. Anish said we are number 1, but, you know, we will do everything to stay a very strong number 1 in that category.
And, just to add there, this is our newest addition to Growth Gems. It has a credible plan to get to $1 billion of market cap in the next 3-5 years. That is the newest addition to Growth Gems.
Hi team. Binay from Morgan Stanley. I know the electric order book is quite small, any insights into the consumer? Where is the consumer coming from for this 15,000 electric vehicle order book that we have? Similarly, if you go 3 years forward, we will have slew of electric vehicle models in our dealerships. Do you see the need to have a separate sort of a distribution marketing channel? Assumingly this will be higher ASP points. There'll also be maybe some risk of cannibalization. Any comments on that?
I'll answer the first question. Maybe Veejay can chip in a little bit if he wants to on the profile of the 400 customer. and on the second question as well. Let me take the second question first. On the second question, I think I would say wait and watch. we haven't yet... You know, these are very hard to... Spinning of a channel is easier said than done. you add a lot of cost to the channel partners. As Veejay mentioned earlier, you know, the whole selling process 2 to 3 years later may be driven much more by technology than it is today. You know, the whole paradigm of you need the big dealerships, as it is, we are moving to cubes.
You know, the whole buying may become much more digitally enabled, especially for the EV kind of customer. I wouldn't at this point of time jump and say that, let's, you know, spin off the channel. We may create brand experience centers that we've said, you know, was EV specific, but we may not. At this point of time, we are not saying, thinking that we need to spin off EV into a separate network for SUVs. Does not mean that we won't consider doing that, but I think it's premature to think about it. Right now we're not working on the path of saying EV should sell out of a separate channel. For many of our customers, they would want to compare ICE and EV before deciding.
You know, every time we talk about our EV SUV numbers, we always say it's a percentage of our SUV portfolio. We are mentally prepared for cannibalization, hence it will be part of how we will sell. At this point of time, at least I would think there's more value in keeping it together in the same channel than spinning it off and then, you know, customer goes to buy EV, doesn't like it, then has to go somewhere else to check out your ICE counterpart. I think you'll lose, we'll lose customer in the process. The orientation we have right now is we should keep it together.
That doesn't mean that won't change as we learn more. The first question, you know, I don't think we've got around to getting all the data, but, you know, we can share some anecdotes and so on. At least I haven't seen the quantitative profile data which we normally get yet on the 15,000. Veejay, you wanna come in? Then I can add as well some anecdotes.
Thanks. Rajesh, not a comprehensive all-India data, but I can give a feel of even a percentage. From the data that I've seen, almost, close to 15% is a very new profile of buyer. It's very interesting to see there are a lot of people in tech cities like Hyderabad, Bangalore, like I was talking to all our Andhra, Telangana, Hyderabad dealers yesterday. Bangalore, Pune, Mumbai, Gurgaon, in a lot of these places which are, you know, where the larger chunks of booking have come from, it's very interesting to see that a lot of the young people want to buy this as their only and first vehicle.
That's also one of the reasons why, you know, we were talking about as a category, when people are taking decisions to buy EVs, the process of buying is a little different. They wanna drive the vehicle a couple of times, they want to be really convinced about the decision because they are looking at this as their primary vehicle. I think there's a fundamental shift where people bought EVs as a second or third vehicle in the family for local travel in short radiuses. Now people want to buy it as a mainstay product. This is a very interesting insight that we are picking up, that the profile of people who are considering applications are gonna be different.
A lot of them, as I said, because we've not had a similar kind of product in the portfolio, there are a lot of them are new people who are experiencing and considering Mahindra as a brand. If you wanna add anything else to that, Rajesh?
Yeah. I would basically think there'll be two sets of people who will come in. One is what Veejay described, which is predetermined movement primarily. You know, you live in a tech city, your office is not that far away, you hence have to charge a couple of times a week. It's a predetermined work to home usage. I think doctors will fall in that category, a lot of them, because, you know, they know the hospitals they have to go to, where they visit. It's a very predetermined radius of movement, so there's a lot of predictability. I think that'll be one group of people. The second will be those who, you know, are multi-car households, hence not worried about range anxiety and then want to add one electric option, which just build...
Which they can use flexibly. I think we're gonna get both, and I think we are getting both. We'll just wait to put the data together. It'll really be the this or that, and they're very different, very different customers really.
Just lastly, I will not ask you for the auto margin guidance, but, generally, what are the margin tailwinds and headwinds that you see from here on?
You know, any time cost goes up is never good for margin, for any reason, because it becomes that much harder to pass margin on cost. When we're looking at margin as a percentage, in an inflationary setup, margins are never easy, right? Unless you start getting a huge operating leverage. Inflation is not good for margin. Deflation is much better for margin because you never will pass on as quickly as the market is dropping. It's not even physically possible because then you'll create a mess of all holding inventory, so on and so forth, right? You will never pass on costs when they're dropping in pricing as quickly, so your margins inflate at that point of time.
When you think about margin, that's the reason I'm not comfortable right now because we need to see what everybody else is doing on the BS VI Phase II. We need to see how much headroom there is. It seems that there will be headroom, but that doesn't mean we should jump in and, you know, milk the proverbial cow, as they call it. Just because everybody's gonna give us headroom, should we lose our sweet spot or is it an opportunity to strengthen ourselves? These are calls that we'll take, right? In terms of growth momentum versus margin. Right now the reason we don't want to say anything is we want to see what everybody's doing on BS VI Phase II. Few people have put out their costs.
They had already said their costs were going to be high and that's reflecting in the way they have taken the kind of price increase. We need to see the couple of our mainstream competitors, what they're going to do and what kind of cost they pass on over the next... Nobody's doing it one shot. People are gonna take one increase now, one in April, one in, maybe a little later. I would just wait to settle that to see how much headroom there is. We should not forget that we've seen almost commodity inflation of 18%-20%. We've seen the BS VI transition not that long back, 1.5-3 years. The BS VI costs, the inflation in the commodities, other regulations have all put a huge amount of inflationary pressure in the category.
To add margin every time you've got such a huge increase in cost is not gonna be easy and that's what is impacting percentage margins. You know, I, both for tractors and auto, you know, my advice is look at per unit right now. That's a much better representation of how the business is doing rather than percentage.
Just to add, two tailwinds are operating leverage, as our capacity goes up, our sales go up. Second, very tight cost control. Then the wild card, whether it's a headwind or tailwind, is commodities. We know all the different pressures of pluses and minuses on commodities. We don't know which way it's going to head in right now. Depends on China, depends on inflationary pressure around the world. Will there be a recession or bigger recession around the world? That is actually good for commodity prices.
In some ways, the right answer to your question is a strong global recession is great tailwind for margins for auto business. Right. That, those are some of the facts.
Hello sir. Raghu here from Emkay, and congratulations on very strong numbers both on the top line as well as on the margins. Sir, firstly, on the farm implement side, the business has been running in a certain way over the last few decades with unorganized dominating the space. Now you are seeing organized taking share and 40% growth is commendable. If you can elaborate a bit on how you are achieving that in terms of adding new spaces, which all segments or products you are covering and how that entire, you know, farm implement space itself is evolving and how you see, you know, like making a better cost of ownership kind of, you know, making it attractive for the farmers to, you know, adopt the organized players.
Hemant, you can pitch in after I finish, if you want. When you think about the farm machinery space, break it up first into what we call tractor attachments and tractor implements. rotavator would be in that category. What is called self-propelled, let's say harvester, rice transplanter, so on and so forth. That's the first level of broad classification. Starting point of problem definition for us is we don't have our representative market share even in tractor implements, right? Even tractor implements like rotavators, like, you know, we've spoken about the fact that we've gained a fair amount of share, but if our tractor market share is 40%, our rotavator market share is only, let's say 18%, 20%, right?
There's an upside for us to make sure that we get all tractor implements at close to tractor market share, right? That's something that we have to believe is our right to win. That's the first upside that's available in the business. Rotavator is a big category, that's the first area of focus that's, you know, we don't need category growth. There it's pure market share play. The harvester category is not a tractor implement. It's a self-propelled category. We have less than 10% market share there. We've done a lot with our product. There we play through Swaraj. Here now we're gonna be investing in, you know, strengthening with an exclusive team that Swaraj will have to sell harvesters and multiple other actions, service capabilities, so on and so forth.
There's no reason why we should not significantly improve our market share in harvesters with a good product. There's one part of this which is really to say, where are we suboptimal by way of market share, even in the organized category today, right? If you look at, let's say INR 450 is YTD odd revenue and you do an annualized of that, and then we're saying, okay, whatever, INR 600 odd crore, INR 600+ crore will be, that is in an organized market of about INR 8,000 crore+, right? We are way below on market share over and above the ability to grow the category. We believe the category will grow, but we have a big upside by way of market share. We're gonna work on both the fronts.
One is how do we grow category? You know, we've often spoken about products like rice transplanters. I think the market size in India is still like maybe 4, 5 thousand a year, not even that.
Less than that.
Less than that. China, which is a smaller paddy growing country than India, sells over 100,000 rice transplanters a year. You know, many of these categories are gonna have a big upside. There's very little farm machines used in horticulture right now in India. Horticulture, as you know now, is, you know, bigger output than even the grain production. There's not enough mechanization that's happened there. There are many products that we're looking in the horticulture space which will help drive mechanization. There are multiple things. That's why, you know, I didn't elaborate that in the presentation, but we've got products which are looking at each of these.
The way we do category creating or pioneering products, as we internally call them, may need a different channel approach than what we're doing for, you know, the mainstream tractor, implement-driven products. You know, I had all of these comments on the slides, but I didn't build on it. Each of those bullet points has a very deep action plan.
I'm just going to add to that. We don't look at 40% growth in this space as commendable. Go back to the comment on being tolerant.
10X.
We're not very tolerant on this right now. What we will commend the team for is that they've actually got a very strong vision now, 10x by 2027 is very clear. A lot of good actions have been taken to start growing this business. Products was a key part. We started with a 6% market share in this space. Right? Now we've got to go from 6 to 40. That should be our first right to be able to do that. It's not just product, it's distribution, it's the ability to understand what the customer wants, it's innovation in certain areas. It's a combination of all of those things. The team has actually done a very nice job of driving that. That is what will get us to the 10x.
Ideally, we want to see 60%-70% annual growth in this space. All of these investments are essential right now, and which is why my comment earlier that we're not focused on margins in this space at this point. If we can get to a 10x by 2027, margins will come after that. All of these investments will cause that margin. We will have such a strong space because this is not a space where you've got many organized players. We've had our dealers selling-.
Everyone else's farm implements, okay? Today, we probably have three or four dealers selling other farm implements. That too, ones where we know that we don't want to make those implements because they are very specific implements for certain categories, which doesn't make sense for us to make. All of that work has been done as well. That's what will put us on the path for the growth here.
Thank you, sir. My second question, I mean, we've been doing very well on the domestic side. FY 2023 has been a very strong growth, and 2024 again should continue with growth, though maybe slightly lower than 2023. On the export side, how are you looking at the opportunity? How things will start playing out there? Currently, things are on the weaker side. I mean, just your thoughts on the efforts and how you see that market. Thank you.
Exports is a space we'll watch for two, three reasons. Firstly, on the auto side, we've done the new launches of the Scorpio-N XUV700 in some of our countries, South Africa, which they've got a very good response. We started selling XUV300 as well. We opened it up in a few countries we weren't in earlier. That's a positive side of the auto story. That being said, we are seeing a downturn because of Sri Lanka and some of our neighboring countries who are going through a really huge economic challenge as a country. We do have a strong presence in the neighboring countries, both in tractors and auto.
When you look at exports, you'll have to break it up into, you know, where are you in one part of the world versus the region South Africa, where the two markets, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, are badly impacted. Very badly impacted. We see Bangladesh coming back a little quicker than Sri Lanka. We are right now not able to see when Sri Lanka will really revive. That when we have strong presence with all our products, both tractor and auto in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, both very, very big markets for us. I think 'til neighboring countries open up, it is gonna have a base effect, you know, where the business in these countries is really low at the moment.
You would see a growth percent impact, even though we are doing things in other parts of the world, but there you're gonna see the effect of what's happening in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, the numbers.
Okay. Thank you. I think we have crossed the time limit already. Thanks a lot. I'm sure we'll have more opportunities to ask you questions. I'd like to thank all of you for being here, and I request you to join us for a tea and XUV400 test drives. Thank you, Anish, Rajesh, and Manoj, and the entire leadership team for being here today. Thank you.
Thank you, everyone. If we haven't answered anyone's questions or you have any follow-up questions, please feel free to send them in. We'll make sure that we get back to you on that.
Thank you.
Thank you.
If you're test driving the XUV400, please be careful in the fearless mode. It really is super fast.