Anil Ambani will soon enter the electric vehicle sector, and his company RInfra has also started planning for it.
Anil Ambani will now compete with Tata Motors and Mahindra & Mahindra by entering the electric vehicle sector. For this, Anil Ambani has appointed the former Indian head of China’s largest electric vehicle company BYD as an advisor. According to media reports, Anil Ambani’s Reliance Infrastructure company is mulling a plan to manufacture electric cars and batteries. Come on, with what kind of planning Anil Ambani is doing this job.
What is Anil Ambani’s plan?
Reliance Infrastructure has hired external consultants to conduct a “cost feasibility” study of the plan to set up an electric vehicle plant with an initial capacity of about 250,000 vehicles per year, Reuters reports. This capacity will later be expanded to 750,000. At the same time, the report says the company will also consider the feasibility of a 10-gigawatt-hour battery plant, the capacity of which can be expanded in the coming years. No official statement has come out from Reliance Infrastructure and former BYD executive Sanjay Gopalakrishnan.
Mukesh Ambani is also working on battery cells.
Anil Ambani is the younger brother of Mukesh Ambani, Asia’s richest man and head of Reliance Industries, which has interests in sectors ranging from oil and gas to telecoms and retail. The family business was split between the two brothers in 2005. Mukesh’s company is already working to manufacture batteries locally and this week won the bid for government incentives for 10GW of battery cell production. If Anil Ambani’s group decides to go ahead with its plans, the brothers will be entering a market where electric vehicles have a fairly low presence but are growing rapidly.
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Government’s $5 Billion PLI Plan
Last year, the share of electric models in the 4.2 million cars sold in India was less than 2 percent, but the government wants to increase that to 30 percent by 2030. It has budgeted more than $5 billion for incentives for companies that make electric vehicles and their components and batteries locally. Battery manufacturing has not yet started in India, but some local manufacturers such as Exide and Amara Raja have signed deals with Chinese companies to acquire the technology needed to make lithium-ion battery cells in the country.
Reuters cited sources as saying that Reliance Infrastructure is also looking for other partners, including Chinese companies, and aims to finalise its plans within a few months. India’s Tata Motors is the largest EV company in the country with around 70 percent market share. Competitors such as SAIC’s MG Motor and BYD are also making steady progress. On the other hand, Maruti Suzuki and Hyundai Motor, which are among the big names in the auto market, are planning to launch EVs by 2025.
RInfra formed two companies
Gopalakrishnan retired from BYD this year after spending more than two years at BYD, setting up the company’s local business, launching three electric vehicles and establishing a dealer network. According to a Reuters report, in June, Reliance Infrastructure formed two new wholly-owned subsidiaries related to the automotive sector. One of them is called Reliance EV Private Limited, whose “primary objective” is to manufacture and market all types of vehicles and components for transportation and transport using any type of fuel.
