Is there a future for Tata Engineering at least in the passenger car segment without an alliance partner?
Smaller auto companies (globally) will have to look for market niches to operate. In the case of Tata Engineering, the niche may be the lower-end car. The unfortunate part is that the lower-end market does not offer much by way of margins. But you need volumes and that kind of scale, and production processes that will give you those advantages. That is what we have to look for. And there we can even stand on our own if we find markets beyond the shores of India. All that would come from having a niche product that is globally competitive. Our challenge today would be to make the Indica globally competitive in terms of costs. If we can find markets to sell 20,000 or 30,000 more Indicas, then we are looking at a very interesting set of numbers. If you add variants to those numbers, you are looking at very reasonable numbers. Then you are in the niche. And if you focus on that niche, invest in technologies required to give that one platform all the variants and changes that you need, you
