We've lined up capex of Rs 15,000 crore for three years: V S Parthasarathy

V S Parthasarathy, chief financial officer (CFO), Mahindra & Mahindra, spoke about the expected growth of the company, the impact of the trade war, acquisition of Korea's SsangYong Motor and Mahindra-Ford alliance during an interview with Swati Khandelwal of Zee Business. Edited Excerpts:

What is your view on the company's performance in this quarter and coming quarters?

The first half of the fiscal has been a profitable revenue growth for us and we hope that the growth story will continue in the same way. However, I prefer not to comment on future stories and that's why can say about just about the growth story of October and November, which has been a good one and we are getting positive indications from rural as well as urban regions.

Trade wars are having an impact on global companies. Do you think that this trade war will have an impact on your business too?

Trade wars will not have an impact on our business as we have decided to treat every country we are operating as our domestic/home market. For instance, the US, where we will have a manufacturing facility in Detroit. Similarly, we also have 4-5 tractor plants in the US. This means that we are treating it as a domestic market and Made in the US for the US kind of thing. We also have two companies in Turkey, where we have major operations, and the manufactured products are supplied within Turkey and the neighbouring markets. Similarly, we have Mahindra Mitsubishi tractor that is operating in Japan and they together create a global hub.

What's happening on the Mahindra-Ford alliance front?

We have a strategic alliance where we will work on the subjects of mutual interest. Interestingly, we are working in five-six areas with a belief that it is a partnership/alliance of a kind which will help both companies to progress and prosper, in future, like in connected cars, electric vehicle, mix segments and joint product development in SUV and compact SUV. Goth teams will work together on all these and see how we can reduce each other's procurement costs. There are exciting areas where the two companies can come together and work strategically in individual areas/streams to benefit each other. So we are progressing step by step in a positive direction.

Name the companies under Mahindra & Mahindra that will be listed in the recent future?

Several billion-dollar babies are lying in our umbrella and we want them to move to the stock market and start the value creation process in the next few years. Mahindra Logistics is the first subsidiary that has a market cap of around Rs 4,000 crore, and there are other projects in the pipeline, but I don't want to prescribe a timeline for anyone of them. But I have informed the group that one IPO in a year will be a great thing to happen, and I hope that over the next 4-5 years other 3-4 companies will reach a stage of IPO. Besides, we have a capital expenditure of Rs 15,000 crore for three years, of which Rs 10,000 crore will be used for product development and remaining Rs 5,000 crore for investments.