MARTIN SCHWENK started his career as a trainee at Daimler in 1992. Since then, he has worn several hats across continents for the German automobile giant.
Before he replaced Roland Folger in November 2018 as chief executive of Mercedes-Benz India, he was chief financial officer of the company in China. Schwenk has big plans for Mercedes’s silver jubilee in India. In an exclusive interview, he gives a glimpse of the carmaker’s electric vehicles and hybrids.
You have come to India from China. How are you settling in?
I just finished three months in the country, and I would say quite honestly when I came for the first time, in September, to look around and to meet my predecessor (Roland Folger), I felt immediately a warm welcome and that continued in November when I started. I always had a very good feeling about India. When I came here I found it as a country of very friendly people, very easy to access and very easy to talk to. Also, from China obviously there is some kind of a language barrier which makes it here, for me, much easier. Obviously, there is still a lot of people I cannot straightforwardly communicate [with], but it is not so difficult. So, I was very well received and I have to say I enjoy here.
How do you compare China and India?
I see that every country has its own development path. China, in terms of infrastructure, is very developed, very enhanced, and I think [in] India there are many projects going on and I see a lot of efforts being undertaken, specifically in the transportation area, and every metro city seems to be building some kind of metro system, which I think is helpful and necessary to ease the traffic in the cities. So, I see the step that China has taken has quite a strong focus on infrastructure and I can see that India also sees that as a vital necessity to bring forward infrastructure. There are a lot of similarities. With people, even though [they] look very different and speak very different, there is a lot of aspirational attitudes, there is a lot of ‘we can do’ type of attitude.
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