Latha & The Leaders: Rajiv Bajaj On Bajaj Auto's Goal For The Next Five Years

My goal remains the same as it has been for the last 30 years. I'll tell you something I heard at the Japan Auto Show, Tokyo Motor Show in 2001, I believe. Rose Moscer was the anchor and she was asking a Honda CEO basically why would Honda exist. And Honda is a company I greatly admire, and I will never forget what he said. He said Honda will exist because society will want Honda to exist. Okay. So the way I see our task and my job is simply this: that we have to give people a reason to permit us to be along. Now in marketing terms that's called differentiation or having a unique selling proposition. And to that objective, our goal as Bajaj has been to have a unique business model of being the world's most versatile motorcycle maker. We never said to ourselves we'll be the biggest motorcycle maker or the most profitable motorcycle maker or the best motorcycle maker, whatever that means. We said the most versatile.

Now this has implications for markets because for example we are a market leader in Africa at one end of the spectrum, selling motorcycles for as little as $500 and trying to make money on them, and we are also a participant in the high performance markets of Europe for example selling a 7,000 motorcycle and of course making a lot of money out of that. So whether it's your choice of markets, your brands, your brand architecture, your product platforms, and the modularity in production and of course the skills of your people, all of these are directly influenced by your choice of strategy. So my job as I have understood it or defined it for myself has been to enable Bajaj to be the most versatile motorcycle maker in the world, and I think to a large extent we've been able to achieve that.