Bajaj Auto's new chief executive Rajiv Bajaj is more at home testing the engines of a bike prototype on the company's test tracks on the outskirts of Pune than at long-winded meetings in his office. Rahul Bajaj's son who earlier in the week took over from his father as the managing director of Bajaj Auto is, unlike his garrulous father, media shy to a fault. But like his father, he jots down his appointments and notes in a small red diary.
More important, Rajiv Bajaj is focused on restoring the company to its old glory of being the country's top two-wheeler company "" a slot it yielded to Hero Honda some years ago. The younger Bajaj is a perfectionist. Those close to him cite examples of his quest for perfection: he once personally sat on over 300 prototype seats to choose the right one.
Rajiv Bajaj's elevation to the top surprised nobody. Rahul Bajaj has been preparing his son for the job for over five years. Armed with an engineering degree from Warwick University in the UK, Rajiv Bajaj walked into the company in 2000 as officer on special duty and straight into a crisis.
Customers had shifted en masse to motorcycles from scooters and Bajaj Auto had been caught napping. Rivals like Hero Honda, TVS and Yamaha were well ahead of the company in the mobike sweepstakes.
Rajiv took some tough decisions "" something that had been unknown at Bajaj Auto. He shut the company's Aurangabad plant because it was not making quality products, pruned the number of vendors from 1,000 to about 200 and pushed an aggressive VRS scheme that trimmed the labour force by half.
But he still needed to get products to take on the competition. Rajiv Bajaj adopted a multi faceted approach: he talked to the company's partner, Kawasaki of Japan, to develop products for the Indian market, tied up with Tokyo R&D for building new bikes and hired bright engineering students with a passion for designing new products.
Based on the feedback from his marketing team, he led the product development initiative.
The breakthrough came with the Pulsar (150 cc and 180cc). The marketing team had told Rajiv that customers were looking for something more in a bike than just being a utilitarian transport vehicle. They wanted rugged styling and more power. Pulsar struck the right chords among customers and brought Bajaj Auto back into the mobike game.
The Indian market, however, was still dominated by the commuter segment: low on features and power but highly fuel efficient. This was the Hero Honda stronghold.
Rajiv Bajaj sat with his marketing team and found one window still open: customers craved more power in the engines, wanted more styling but would not pay more for these features. The R&D department worked on these assumptions and came out with Bajaj Discover. The company quickly notched up sales of the bike of 25,000 a month.
The big moment came when Bajaj Auto's CT 100 eclipsed Hero Honda Splendor as the country's largest selling motorcycle late last year. The motorcycle had been a runaway success.
Oddly enough, Rajiv Bajaj is deeply involved in the company's R&D but has a phobia about hi-tech gizmos. He barely uses mobile phones (you will find it on the voice mail most of the time), barely uses a PC (brother Sanjiv jokes and says he hardly knows how to use it) and prefers a spartan office next to the plant.
Of course, there are some luxuries that come with his positions "" he drives a BMW with passion. But he is equally at home racing on a Ducati Monster mobike parked in the house where the family lives together.
Insiders say that he is a workaholic but heads back home by 7 pm sharp.
And he is passionate about football. In fact, he used to play with his employees till an accident put him out of action. But that does not stop him heading for his well-equipped gym at home for a workout and a tete a tete with his younger brother Sanjiv.
After establishing Bajaj Auto as the number two mobike maker in the country (over 1.5 million bikes annually), what's Rajiv Bajaj's next goal? The immediate one is to transform Bajaj into a global company.
The first steps have already been taken. Bajaj bikes will soon be manufactured at the Kawasaki plant in the Philippines for the local market. And in Africa, the company will take on cheap Chinese bikes, which dominate the market, by stressing their quality and high price. Rajiv Bajaj, meanwhile, will no doubt be personally checking them out too.
