‘Bridgestone to unveil market expansion strategy to push next 10 years of growth’

Adoption of Gen AI faster than PCs, smartphones, says Oracle

Bridgestone India, a wholly owned subsidiary of Bridgestone Corporation, Japan, is currently preparing a 10-year strategy to spearhead market expansions across India.

“India has been identied as a growth market and focus market for Bridgestone globally,” Rajarshi Moitra, Chief Commercial O®cer, Bridgestone India, told The Hindu. “We are working on a new business strategy that will spearhead the next orbit of our growth in the country. Our new India strategy for 10 years will kick in from calendar 2025,” he said.

According to Mr. Moitra, India is the fastest growing and stable market for Bridgestone and the company has made strong investments here in the last over 25 years, including the latest chunk of $300 million it announced. “The new strategy will be aimed at building the market further and to continue to be a strong player in the premium tyre segment in the country. The strategy will also address India’s positioning in the global market for Bridgestone,” he added.

On the market scenario, Mr. Moitra said post the pandemic, Bridgestone had seen robust growth in India. The company’s revenue grew 9% year-on-year during calendar 2023.

However, the industry in general saw subdued sales volumes in the last couple of quarters.

In the rst quarter of CY24, the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM)

The strategy will also address India’s positioning in the global market for Bridgestone RAJARSHI MOITRA,

segment had done a “low single-digit”, while the after-market segment had been ‘attish, he said.

“In the short term, the industry is seeing some pressure. But long-term outlook is quite bullish as the macro economic scenario continues to be quite positive in terms of GDP growth and government investment,” he said.

‘‘As per our internal estimate, we expect the industry, in the long term to grow 5-6% in after-market and 4-5% in the OEM segment in the next ve years,” he added.

“It also indicates that the auto sector will continue to remain positive,” Mr. Moitra said. More than 46 million units of tyres (for passenger car and SUVs) were sold in 2023 with after-market and OEMs forking out an almost equal share in the industry. In this calendar, the industry is expected to sell 48 million units of tyres, he said.

Adoption of Generative AI (Gen AI) is happening at a faster pace than smartphones or PCs, said Oracle, a technology rm based in Austin, Texas.

“If one compares the rst four years of many recent technologies, it is evident that adoption of Gen AI is happening at a faster pace than smartphones or PCs,” said Chris Chelliah, senior vice president, Technology and Customer Strategy, Oracle, Japan & APAC.

According to him, Gen AI is at the forefront of many conversations of enterprises globally and has also changed the way Oracle had developed its new products.

“Today, not only is Oracle Generative AI supporting customers, it is also changing how Oracle itself develops new products,” he said.

According to Saravanan Palanivel, Vice President, Cloud Engineering, Oracle India, AI’s capability is growing rapidly as it is “getting better and faster.”

For instance, it took over a decade for AI’s handwriting recognition to be as good as the average human, but the learning curve for AI models to reach human parity for reading comprehension and language understanding has gotten signicantly steeper.

“For speech recognition it took 17 years, handwriting recognition 14 years, image recognition 6 years, reading comprehension 2 years… to reach human parity,” Mr. Palanivel said.