What Will It Take For Bajaj Auto To Become India's Largest Motorcycle Company

Bajaj Auto is the world’s third largest motorcycle company, but what will it take for Rajiv Bajaj to make it India’s largest?

- Rajiv Singh

August 2017. The room in Pravasi Bhartiya Kendra in New Delhi was packed to the rafters with political heavyweights, helmed by Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi and his entire cabinet, Niti Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant and over 300 business leaders from different industrial sectors. The head honchos were called in for a two-day brainstorming on the Make in India programme as a part of a government initiative called ‘Champions of Change’.

The industrialists were divided into six to eight groups of 50 to 60 and, at the end of the second day, one from each group had to make a 10-minute presentation to the PM. Rajiv Bajaj, managing director of motorcycle maker Bajaj Auto, who led one group, chose to outline five initiatives to take the programme forward.

Make in India has, of course, been the government’s effort to attract investments from across the globe to spur manufacturing in India. “Go and sell in any country of the world, but manufacture here,” Modi had declared when he launched the programme in his maiden Independence Day speech in 2014.

Bajaj knows a thing or two about making in India and selling to the world. He’s been doing that for more than a decade now. As of the first five months of fiscal year 2018 (April to August), over 40 percent of Bajaj’s two- and three-wheeler production—some 0.71 million and 0.17 million, respectively—were sold in more than 70 countries. That’s enough to make Bajaj Auto the third largest motorcycle maker in the world.