An Enduring Ride

Anurang Jain, who along with twin Tarang joins the ranks of the world’s billionaires, has placed Endurance Technologies on the runway to growth.

- Samar Srivastava

In the ten years to 2005, Anurang Jain and Endurance Technologies were on a roll.

A rapidly expanding market for two-wheelers saw the company increase revenues by a staggering 50 times to about ₹500 crore over those ten years. Endurance Technologies, which had started two decades earlier as an aluminium castings supplier to India’s second largest two-wheeler company, Bajaj Auto, had come a long way. Jain was grateful to the Bajajs of Bajaj Auto for their backing during the initial years (Jain’s mother, Suman, is Rahul Bajaj’s sister) and quickly moved to enlarge the product footprint.

He’d expanded the base of products to include shock absorbers, front forks, clutch assemblies and disc brakes. Importantly, they had been developed by Endurance alone and were its proprietary technology. An expanding national footprint meant that they could serve virtually all two-wheeler companies in India.

But as he surveyed India’s automotive landscape circa 2005, Jain, now 56, was also acutely aware of the need for a pivot. At 95 percent of sales, the business was heavily dependent on Bajaj Auto. “We realised that we needed to further diversify our customer base,” he says. Simply put there was a limit to how rapidly Bajaj Auto could grow and what had taken Endurance to ₹500 crore would not take it to ₹5,000 crore. Just as setting up the business in 1985 in Aurangabad had tested Jain’s mettle, making the company a top league auto component maker would prove to be another test—a sterner one.

A little over a decade later, it’s clear that Jain has passed the test with flying colours. For good measure, for the first time, Jain (along with brother Tarang) finds himself among Forbes’s billionaires (one of 119 Indians) with a net worth of $1.5 billion.