Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd (M&M) plans to bring all the cab aggregator businesses, the company has invested in, under its newly constituted shared mobility vertical, a senior company executive told Mint on Saturday.
“This would be done from a leadership point of view. The idea is to bring coordination and create a strong forum to leverage each other’s competencies,” the executive said requesting anonymity.
In December, M&M had announced a succession plan, which outlined the creation of shared mobility services vertical, parallel to segments such as automotive, farm, among others, under the conglomerate’s corporate umbrella.
To be headed by VS Parthasarathy – the group chief financial officer, effective 1 April, 2020, the shared mobility services unit has been created by merging the aftermarket, logistics, and automobility businesses.
M&M’s automobility businesses include its investments in cab aggregator space such as Meru Cabs, in which it infused ₹44.71 crore in the first tranche to acquire 36.63% stake in December, Glyde – its electric mobility service for select routes from Mumbai – and also the people transportation services (PTS), which comes under Mahindra Logistics Ltd.
In an interview to Economic Times, Mahindra Logistics CEO Rampraveen Swaminathan said the company plans to introduce a new brand called Alyte targeting corporate fleet services from this quarter.
In the Q3 FY20 analysts’ concall, Swaminathan had estimated that Mahindra Logistics’ PTS business, which has seen a decline in revenues this fiscal, would bounce back by Q1 FY21.
Mahindra Logistics’ revenue fell 7.5% year-on-year to ₹908 crores in Q3 FY20. For the nine-month period ended December 31, its revenue stood at ₹2,659 crore. While PTS contributed 10% to the topline, the remaining 90% came from the supply chain management or the SCM segment in the said period. The group company aims to build up the business under PTS going forward.
“We have been able to hold our margins in the PTS business despite the volume impact. We have been able to leverage our asset-light model and take cost out in line with those reductions in operations. So this is a correction curve and we will expect that by Q1 next year, we will be back on course,” Swaminathan had said.
M&M aims to build its presence in the shared mobility space, taking competition to existing players such as Ola and Uber but in the corporate fleet category.
