01 MESSAGE FROM THE LEADERS CHAIRMAN’S MESSAGE Dear Shareholders, In my letter to you last year, I had described the prevailing global situation as a Samudra Manthan – a churning. I acknowledged that every country and every company was inescapably going to have to swallow some of the poison churned up by the Manthan. However, I had also urged that instead of focusing on mere mitigation of the effects of the poison, we could proactively view the Manthan as an opportunity to garner some of the amrit for ourselves. Because be it a country or a business, the winners would be the ones who were resilient enough to navigate the uncertainty and ambiguity thrown up by the Manthan and gain some advantage from it. It makes me very happy to note that both your country and your company have demonstrated excellent navigational skills. In a world that is rebalancing and moving from globalisation to selective partnerships, India’s relevance has grown. Its ability to combine scale with strategic flexibility is positioning it as an increasingly important pillar of a distributed global economy. It is being seen as a credible and stable alternative for investment, manufacturing, and talent (today, approximately 25% of all iPhones are manufactured in India!). Politically, it has quietly protected its own interests while dealing with other nations with diplomacy and tact. Economically, it is the fastest-growing major economy in the world. In an unpredictable world, India is holding its own. Your company too has extracted some amrit from the Manthan. The results for the year gone by are outstanding and have hit historical highs. We are rewriting the rules of mobility and comfort with the revolutionary NU_IQ platform. The number of patents granted has jumped from 56 to 1,300+ in the last one decade, showcasing our capacity to innovate, despite the tsunami swirling around us. The Mahindra Group has, during this volatile period, announced one of the largest prospective investments in its history in Nagpur (₹15,000 crore over 10 years), demonstrating our confidence in our ability to navigate the future. These achievements have been recognised by several external entities. We have been named Outstanding Company of the Year at the India Business Leadership Awards and as one of the world’s Top 50 Companies by TIME magazine. All this is very heartening. However, as recent events, particularly in West Asia are showing, the Manthan is far from over. We have navigated the first churning. We must now brace ourselves for Manthan 2.0. Uncertainty is no longer the exception; it is the rule. Black swan events have become obsolete because the pond is full of black swans. Situations that were previously seen as temporary disruptions are now proving to be a more long-term reset of supply chains, geopolitical alignments, and technologies. There is a shift from episodic shocks to continuous earthquakes, where anticipating change is increasingly difficult, and the imperative is to build the agility and resilience to navigate a constantly shifting landscape. Manthan 2.0 is, indeed, upon us. Anand G. Mahindra Chairman
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