Daybreak - How the MG Windsor left Tata and Hyundai behind to become India's top-selling EV

Episode Date: March 6, 2025

This year the JSW MG Windsor became the highest selling electric car in India. It recently even managed to outperform Tata’s most popular offerings like the Nexon and Punch EV. It recorded total sales of over 10,000 units in a single quarter, beating all the models from Tata, Mahindra, and Hyundai.The obvious question here is – what did MG do differently? And the answer is simple – by doing for EVs what Reliance did for cell phones in the early 2000s. Tune inDaybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Hi, this is Rohan Dharma Kumar. If you've heard any of the Ken's podcasts, you've probably heard me, my interruptions, my analogies, and my contrarian takes on most topics. And you might rightly be wondering why am I interrupting this episode too? It's for a special announcement. For the last few months, I and Sita Ramon Ganesh, my colleague and the Ken's deputy editor, have been working on an ambitious new podcast. It's called Intermission.

We want to tell the secret sauce stories of India's greatest companies. Stories of how they were born, how they fought to survive, how they build their organizations and culture, how they manage to innovate and thrive over decades, and most importantly, how they're poised today. To do that, Sita and I have been reading books, poring over reports, going through financial statements, digging up archives, and talking to dozens of people. And if that wasn't enough, we also decided to throw in video into the mix. Yes, you heard that right. Intermission has also had to find its footing in the world of multi-camera shoots in professional studios, laborious editing, and extensive post-production. Sita and I are still reeling from the intensity of our first studio recording.

Intermission launches on March 23rd. To get an alert as soon as we release our first episode, please follow Intermission on Spotify and Apple Podcasts or subscribe to the Ken's YouTube channel. You can find all of the links at the ken.com slash I am. With that, back to your episode. Last year, JSWMG Motor launched a new electric vehicle. It was a crossover SUV called the Windsor. At first glance, it looked like pretty much any MG SUV.

Nothing out of the ordinary. And yet, most news publications back then were touting this launch as revolutionary. Turns out, they were right. Because today, about six months later, Windsor has become one of the best-selling electric cars in India. It recently even managed to outperform Tata's most popular offerings like Nexon and PunchEV. The obvious question here is, what did M.G do differently? And the answer is simple. By doing for EVs what Reliance did for cell phones back in early 2000s.

Allow me to explain. Picture this. It is December 2002. Mobile phones have entered the market, but the average Indian is still pretty skeptical. Cell phone connections are patchy and more importantly, expensive. And devices themselves were unwieldy, limited, and again, expensive. Now, if you're under the age of 25, this may come as a shock to you, so brace yourselves. But basic services like sending a text or a voicemail or call waiting, you know, when you call

somebody and it's busy, all of these things were considered add-on services and they needed to be purchased separately. So most people thought it wasn't worth the investment. They were okay with the good old-fashioned landline telephones at home. It is not that people thought this was some kind of a fad. By then, it was clear that it was the future. And then, Reliance came in and changed everything. Back then, Mokeshambani launched Infocom. The idea was to make telephone calls in India as cheap as sending a postcard. And as we all know, it worked. Slowly, as costs started to drop, more and more people saw sense in adopting mobile phones and eventually abandoning landlines altogether. And life was never the same again. It's crazy that the same company,

Reliance, managed to disrupt mobile telephony all over India again with Geo. But it was Reliance Infocom's CDMA phone back in the day where original mobile revolution actually began. The first time around though, Reliance managed to pull this off in three simple ways. Offer a competitive product at a low-entry price, make future costs predictable based on usage, and throw in a bunch of other stuff for free. Now, you are probably wondering why are we talking about mobile phone adoption so much? This episode is by no means a history lesson. But that context was very important and you will know soon enough. Because India is almost exactly where it was back then. Except the device they are on the fence about now instead of mobile phones is electric vehicles.

Funnily enough, the solutions that some of the players are coming up with are eerily similar to the reliance strategy back then. Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken. I'm your host, Nagda Sharma, and I don't chase the new cycle. Instead, every day of the week, my colleague Rahil Filippos and I will come to you with one business story that is worth understanding. and worth your time. Today is Thursday, the 6th of March. Why did Windsor succeed? I'm going to explain it in just a moment, but before that, I have an exciting announcement to make. This episode of

daybreak is based on an issue of our very popular newsletter called The NutGraph, written by my colleague Ken's C-O-O-Proveen Gopal-Krishan. You can now listen to the latest edition of NutGraph every single Saturday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or the Ken app. We will add all the links to the show notes of this episode. And with that out of the way, let us get into the Windsor success story. Well, it wasn't so much about the car. Instead, it was about the aggressive pricing model that the company had put in place for it. It's called the Battery as a Service or BAAAS pricing model. So customers could just purchase a car at an introductory price of just under 10 lakh rupees, but they would then be able to pay a battery usage fee of rupees 3.5 per kilometer. It was like a subscription plan for your

EV battery. And then there were the bells and the whistles, like an assured buyback plan, a lifetime battery warranty. It was like a never seen before deal. Of course, the price of the car has gone up since then, but the bold strategy indicated one thing, and one thing only. M.G. is not playing around. They had every intention to completely disrupt the electric car market here in India. In fact, Pat Jindal, the director of JSWMG Motor in India, said as much in an interview around the launch. So this is the product that we think can truly take the EV penetration in India to the next level. We are actually not really

that focused on just the EV segment. We want this product to compete with ice. Head on. We want to cannibalize and take market share away from ice. He pointed out how most car sales in India happen in the below 10 lakh rupees segment. So the only way to disrupt the market was to enter that segment. Which is why they decided to play in the 9 to 11 lakh rupees segment. They recognized that that was the sweet spot from a pricing perspective.

JSW also did not just stop at pricing. It also went ahead and announced a lifetime battery warranty to Windsor buyers. Plus, the buyback scheme at 60% of the car's value definitely did not hurt. It also threw in free vehicle maintenance warranty, free roadside assistance and scheduled servicing for three years. It was a gift that kept on giving. Okay, so now let us take a moment and break down all of this. To get more people to buy EVs, specifically MG EVs,

JSW did three things. One, it created a competitive product at a low entry price. Two, it made future costs predictable. And three, it threw in a bunch of attractive add-ons. Do you see where I'm going here? Because it sounds a lot like what Reliance did with Infocom back in. in the 2000s. So where does MG go from here now?

Stay tuned to find out. One way to assess whether JSW's strategy with Windsor will work is to ask whether electric vehicles or EVs today are where mobile phones were in the early 2000s, which is also how I started this episode. Like I said earlier, in some ways it is true. EVs are the future and yet, like with mobile phones, adoption has been slow. Last year was particularly bad and I think we have spoken about this multiple

times on daybreak. And that is because of the high upfront costs and uncertainty about the tech changing infrastructure and unknown future costs. Which is why people who buy EVs today are technically ones who can actually afford it. They are somewhat tech savvy and they want to display it as a status symbol. All of this was true also back in the 2000s, if you remember, when only a few people had mobile phones. Specifically for India, JSW's bold bet needs to be seen in that context. Around the same time, it was launched. The Indian government announced the new electric subsidy policy titled PM Electric Drive Revolution in innovative vehicle enhancement or PME drive scheme. This has an outlay of 10,900 crore rupees over two years. The new policy offers

incentives and subsidies for electric scooters, bikes, three-wheelers, buses and trucks. It is the continuation of the previous policy, fame too. But there is one pretty noticeable absence, electric cars. The thing is, this will most certainly slow down the adoption of electric cars. In fact, it already has. In the period after Fame 2 subsidy came to an end, electric cars sales in India have dropped by nearly 10%. Simply put, if we want electric cars to go through mass adoption in India, subsidies from the government are not going to be the way to do it any longer.

In his newsletter, Praveen said that it is likely that the Indian government is secretly hoping that its move will encourage companies like JSW to go. go the reliance route. If manufacturers of EVs need consumers to adopt them, they will simply need to try harder and be more innovative with pricing, financing, marketing and everything else. This places the risk and uncertainty in the hands of the companies themselves. And not all companies have the kind of capital, appetite, or the willingness to blow thousands of scores to create adoption with consumers. But there is a flip side to work. all of this. When Reliance stepped up in 2002 with mobile phones, it came in as a disruptive,

powerful force that transformed mobile telephony forever in India. It spent a massive amount of money to do this. However, it did not reap the benefits. There are many reasons why Reliance could not capitalize on what it created. It bet on the wrong technology and CDMA was a worse option than GSM. It had problems with service quality, plus there was an internal battle between Mukesh and Anel Ambani, which did not help. Praveen says that perhaps GSM is in a similar place, although the scale of its ambition is a lot smaller. It's testing out its new electric car scheme for just one model instead of betting the house on it. Just like Reliance, it is also a company with deep pockets and it can afford to persist at losing money to grow the market if it wants to.

This time around, its bet seems to be paying off. The carmaker managed to sell well over 10,000 units within three months of its launch. In fact, it has already hiked up the price of the car by $50,000 rupees across variance. But what does that mean for the rest of the industry? Well, In all likelihood, it could compel other companies to change the way they work, to take risks, to do more strange new things to get people to buy, adopt and switch to EVs. Maybe this is how the revolution begins. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken, India's first subscriber-focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample of our subscriber-only offerings.

A full subscription unlocks. A full subscription unlocks daily long, feature stories, newsletters and podcast extras. To subscribe, head to the ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on top of the Ken website. Today's episode was hosted by Snigda Sharma and edited by Rajiv Siyadh.