Coming Soon: A Mahindra Aircraft

November 4, 2013 Leave a comment

Coming Soon: A Mahindra Aircraft

by Seema Singh | Nov 1, 2013

Aerospace is not quite automotive but Anand Mahindra believes that just as Mahindra Jeeps plied Indian roads even as they were being made, Mahindra utility aircraft will fly Indian skies even as runways are being readied. In two years Mahindra Aerospace will begin manufacturing GA-8s in India. GA-8 and GA-10 (the numeric indicates seating capacity) enters its portfolio via the acquisition of Australia’s GippsAero, which makes these aircraft. At the inauguration of its Rs 150-crore aerostructures facility near Bangalore, Mahindra announced a strategic partnership with Aernova of Spain, a Tier I global aerostructures supplier that will transfer technology to Mahindra. Initially, the Bangalore facility will supply components to the aircraft being made by GippsAero in Australia, but it soon plans to enter the global supply chain. At peak capacity the plant could gross Rs 250 crore in revenue and employ 400 people. With commercial aerospace booming even as defence aerospace shrinks, according to a Deloitte 2013 report, Mahindra’s vision to increase India’s footprint in the global sourcing market is not sentimentalism. It hasn’t named its customers but some of the top manufacturers—Boeing, Airbus and EuroCopter—were at the launch and were interested in testing the components. Between aerostructures and utility aircraft—provided it finds a good number of customers for the latter in India—Mahindra Aerospace could well turn out to be a worthy sibling of the group’s automotive business.

Filed under Macro Trends

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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