The Man Behind the $2,500 Car

India has been talked about as becoming a small car manufacturing hub. What impact will the Nano have on that future?
It will only enhance it. It won't hurt it in any way. Finally, the people are going to decide if this car is going to do what everybody fears it will do or not. Not us. We have as a company put together a concept and converted it to reality, and we believe it is a very interesting value proposition but finally the market will need to decide. Who enters and who competes and what that product is going to do to us is a function of who addresses what the customer wants.

Renault-Nissan has already announced they are going to get into this game. Do you anticipate that this will be an active space that a lot of companies want to get into?
It will be. There's been self-denial that this space is a real space until we addressed it. We will have several people following us, including big companies, and we will need to raise the issue of why those big companies did not address those areas earlier. But possibly the first national car company to address it will be a Chinese company. The day they consider this to be an important segment of the market we will see a Chinese company come closest to us or even break our barrier.

Your coming into this market is somewhat similar to the entrance of Suzuki in the 1980s, in that it has the potential to create huge volumes. In working with suppliers, have you seen inklings of the kind of sea change that the launch of the Maruti 800 engendered?
We have. There was first a lot of disbelief among suppliers that we were really serious about this business. In West Bengal we conceived of a situation where they would be a campus-with ourselves and our vendors on the same campus. The acceptance of this and the investment in this was minimal at first. But now we can't provide enough space in our campus. Suddenly vendors are seeing large volumes, the ability to amortize investments they would have to make that they were not willing to do, and they've ceded their place to other vendors who were willing to do it. Now some of the majors want to come back in and play a role. In fairness, somebody else did take the risk, did place their faith in us, and they're there.

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