‘Objective is to expand the midsize motorcycle segment in every market’
NEWDELHI: Royal Enfield has dominated its market segment for close to two decades, but challengers are now showing up in Bajaj Auto Ltd, Triumph Motorcycles, BMW, Harley Davidson and Jawa Motorcycles. However, Siddhartha Lal, CEO of Eicher Motors Ltd which owns Royal Enfield is unperturbed, and is preparing to take the brand global. Edited excerpts from an interview: In India, above-500cc motorcycles are very expensive and normally imported. In a market of 20 million motorcycles, just 10,000 to 15,000 units are in the 500cc and above segment because the market is not served well. Our objective is, the way we catered to the entry of midsize motorcycles with the 350cc offerings, we want to replicate the same with the upper midsize. That’s the direction we are going in. We have around 3.5 million customers riding Royal Enfield today and most of them have upgraded from 150cc or 200c motorcycles to 350cc ones. With the new 650 Twins, we wish to give similar jump in sophistication, refinement and speed but with only one step jump in affordability. Our objective is to expand the midsize motorcycle segment in every market we will enter. outside love the modern classic concept of Royal Enfield products but with bit more power, refinement and highway worthy. We have been gathering a team of professionals who have done this kind of work over the last four or five years since in India we have not done this kind of work. So, our technology centre in UK now has 140 engineers and designers. This was a collaboration project between the global team sitting in UK and our technology centre in Chennai. So this was always meant to be a global project and the 650 Twins are
our calling card for the world. There is a huge vacant spot in the mid-size modern classic type of motorcycles and most of the European and American motorcycle manufacturers have moved to bigger motorcycles since they prefer to make low volume and earn high margins. On the contrary, we are going after scale. So, the market there usually starts at 850cc and we are coming at a notch below at 650cc but it has similar attributes.