Guenter Butschek, the 57-year-old managing director of Tata Motors Ltd, has steered the company’s India operations to a profit for the first time in five quarters. But the bigger task that Butschek claims he has achieved is making the company less vulnerable to unpleasant shocks.

“Don’t blame the market for dropping the ball. The best argument for me was that overall market volume dropped but it’s not enough of a reason to trouble your market share,” Butschek said in an interview.

Tata Motors, the country’s biggest commercial vehicle maker, has largely arrested the declining market share in most segments of the business. In fact, the company has increased its share in light commercial vehicles (LCV) while maintaining the share in medium and heavy commercial vehicles (M&HCV) or trucks. This has helped its domestic business turn profitable during the October-December quarter after five successive loss-making quarters.

New Delhi: Truck makers are preparing to boost production, encouraged by the government’s proposal to raise allocation for infrastructure by more than Rs1 trillion for the year starting 1 April, two people aware of the matter said.

India’s top three truck makers—Tata Motors Ltd, Ashok Leyland Ltd and Volvo Eicher Commercial Vehicles Ltd—have asked their suppliers to ramp up capacity, anticipating an increase in demand for trucks and tippers which are used for road construction, transportation and mining.

Going by Tata Motors Ltd’s December quarter performance that missed profit estimates by a wide margin, the road ahead is likely to be a rough one. The main worry is due to the disappointing performance of its cash-cow Jaguar Land Rover Ltd (JLR) that has been churning out healthy profits for several years and which churned out 90% to 100% of the consolidated profits.

For the quarter, Tata Motors’ consolidated net profit of Rs 1,212 crore missed Bloomberg’s 15-broker average estimate by a huge 48%.

Tata Motors Ltd reported about a 13-fold rise in quarterly profit on Monday, driven by higher sales from its Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) business after a particularly weak quarter a year earlier.

Net profit for the quarter ended December 31 came in at Rs 12 billion versus Rs 937.7 million in the same quarter a year earlier.

Tata Motors expects demand for trucks to remain strong for the next two years on back of the improving performance of the core sectors, pick up in infrastructure projects and implementation of BSVI emission norms in 2020 that is likely to prompt transporters to advance purchase, said Girish Wagh, head of truck and business at Tata Motors. Truck sales in India - a proxy for economic activity, have been on a rise in eight out of nine months of the current financial year.

Tata Motors on Wednesday reported 23 per cent increase in total global sales at 1,16,677 units for December 2017.

Global wholesales of all Tata Motors' commercial vehicles and Tata Daewoo range in December 2017 were at 47,182 units, an increase of 53 per cent over the same month previous year, the company said in a statement.

Homegrown auto major Tata Motors MD and CEO Guenter Butschek has called employees to bolster accountability and drive performance within the organisation as the firm seeks to build on the positives of its turnaround drive that is expected to be completed by March.

In his New Year message to employees, Butschek said several steps taken in 2017 such as accelerated efforts on sales enhancement, rigorous cost reduction have shown quick results on market share and bottom-line improvement, but the effort needs to continue.

Tata Motors and Ashok Leyland were trading higher by 3% each, recovering from their respective intra-day lows, after they reported a strong set of sales numbers in December 2017.

Tata Motors was up 3% at Rs 439, its highest level since November 10, 2017 on the BSE, after the company’s commercial and passenger vehicles domestic sales grew 52% at 54,627 units in December.

JLR retail volumes increased by 10% y-o-y in November 2017, the first month of near double-digit growth after five months of disappointment. Land Rover volumes grew by 17% y-o-y led by new Discovery and RR Velar. JLR needs to report 8% y-o-y growth during the December 2017-March 2018 period to meet our FY2018 estimates. We feel confident of JLR achieving this as new Velar, launch of E-Pace and Discovery will boost volumes. Maintain BUY. JLR retail volume rose by 10% y-o-y to 52,332 units in November 2017.

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