Hero Group takes a leap of faith with its deep tech ambitions

India’s largest two wheeler manufacturer is looking at an uncanny diversification into high end technology companies. Its intentions may be good but deep tech has been a hard business to scale in India

Vandana, 20 Jul 2020

Hero Electronix is betting on two major areas—connected devices and semiconductor engineering

With an intent to invest $200 million, it acquired three companies that gave it different deep tech capabilities

It also built a consumer IoT venture called Qubo from scratch; it plans to become a platform for connected devices

It doesn’t want to subsume these businesses into one large company; instead it wants to promote synergies between them

Traditionally, the HeroMotoCorp is known for one thing—two-wheelers. Since Brijmohan Lall Munjal founded the company in 1984, it has grown into the overwhelming market leader in the Indian motorcycle space, becoming an iconic national brand in the process. Its for the year ended March 2020—Rs 28,836 crore ($3.8 billion)—can largely be attributed to sticking to its knitting.

In 2016, though, Ujjwal Munjal, the grandson of Brijmohan Munjal, broke with tradition.

AUTHOR

Vandana

Vandana is based in Delhi. She covers vertically focussed startups in consumer internet space and also writes on travel tech and smartphones for The Ken. She has spent 13 years in journalism covering a wide range of subjects- equity markets, mutual funds to education and skilling, working at organisations such as Business Standard, CNBC TV18 and The Week in the past.

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