Mahindra & Mahindra Limited (MM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Okay. Good afternoon, everyone. Good day, and welcome to M&M Q3 FY '22 Earnings Call. We are indeed glad to have you all on this call today. The safe harbor statement, which normally we have before during every call, it's displayed on the screen. I won't read it. Now I would like to welcome our senior management team for the call. We have with us today, Dr. Anish Shah, Managing Director and CEO; Mr. Rajesh Jejurikar, Executive Director, Auto and Farm Sector; Mr. Manoj Bhat, Group CFO. Along with them, and today, we also have Mr. Hemant Sikka, President Farm Equipment Sector; and Veejay Nakra, CEO, Automotive Division. With this, now I hand over the mic to Dr. Anish Shah, and we will have the opportunity to have Q&A at the end of the presentations. Over to you, Anish.

Thank you, Sriram, and good afternoon, good morning, everyone. I would start with some of the key messages that we have for today, and we see a steady revenue growth with Q3 being up 8% and year-to-date up 29%. This is despite various supply chain challenges, and we'll talk about that, but we do see them easing going forward. Margin pressure has been the big story for this year, driven by commodity prices and then further exacerbated by the supply chain challenges, especially with regard to semiconductors that reduced volumes and thereby reduced operating leverage. But despite the margin pressures, our PAT after EI for the third quarter is up 2.5x or 2.5x. And year-to-date is up 5x. And this is really driven by results from our capital allocation actions. We have talked about that in the past and talked about how that will take away the losses we've had from those companies and increase profits in future, and we are seeing that now. We also see a strong consolidated PAT after EI, which is up 57% for the same quarter and up 2.4x year-to-date, and this is reflective of strong performance across all our businesses. First, starting with revenue. Auto up 15%, tractor up 15% year-to-date, international exports are strong. And there are supply chain headwinds, but as I mentioned, they're starting to ease out now. So we're looking at some positivity there. PAT before EI is where we see the impact of the commodity pressures and the operating leverage. So that is down 22% for the quarter. But for the year, it continues to be up 28%. PAT after EI is where we see the benefits of capital allocation that we took last year. And we see our profits going up from INR 531 crores for the same quarter last year to INR 1,353 crores for this year's third quarter. At the consolidated level, we see a strong growth in profit before and after EI. Before EI is up 28%, after EI is up 57% and we'll talk a little more about performance across the group companies. A quick highlight on farm, and we'll go deeper into that. Revenue is up 2% in a tough quarter, even as market has gone down, and this is driven really by a market share increase of 140 basis points, which is a fairly substantial number. Year-to-date, farm revenue is up 15%. Profit, again, you see the impact of commodity prices here, it's down 24% for the quarter, but year-to-date, it's up 4%. And we've talked about international subsidiaries in the past, it is now positive for 6 quarters in a row in terms of PBIT, which is again a good reflection of the category A and B that we had talked about earlier. And we are seeing the benefits of these businesses turning around and getting on the path to the returns and growth that we want. Auto sees a better performance in revenue as we've seen some easing of supply chain, 16% up for the quarter, 40% year-to-date. Here, in addition to commodity prices, we've got a volume loss of 20,000 due to ECU shortages and therefore, PBIT is down 40%, but it's improving from a quarter-over-quarter basis. Mahindra Finance is one area where we had seen loss in the first quarter, driven by higher GNPA and resulting provisions. We see it coming back very well. In fact, a little better than what was promised by the business. The promise was 70% to 80% of provisions reversed in 3 quarters after that. At this point, 60% has been reversed in the first 2 quarters already. So we are slightly ahead of track on that. GNPAs have gone from 15.5% to 11.3%. And as we see the provisions, INR 2,517 crores was what was taken in the first quarter, 60% of that has been reversed, and we do expect to see good performance on reversing these in the future as well. The deep dive that we've shown before, Stage 3 asset under management has gone down from INR 7,900 crores to INR 7,088 crores. Stage 2, down from INR 1,287 crores to INR 10,980 crores. This is being tracked very closely, and we expect a further reduction in both Stage 2 and Stage 3 in the current quarter. In addition, we have talked about -- the business has talked about the RBI circular that was released in November, which talks about IRACP norms. And there is still some clarity awaited. If the business has to meet GNPAs and net NPAs for IRACP norms as well, then we would have to go down to a net NPA of less than 6%. And to do that, we would likely have to take a INR 500 crore to INR 1,500 crore additional provision in Q4 to achieve that over and above the other performance that the business will drive, but the other performance we expect to be positive. So we will have more clarity on this. And once we do, then we will share that with everyone as well. Very strong performance in Tech Mahindra. PAT is up 5% for the quarter, but 21% year-to-date. And in addition to that, it's a broad-based growth across multiple segments. TCV is $700 million plus. Attrition is down. And one thing we are very proud of is the work on the sustainability and climate change front where we are the only Indian company to score A in both CDP climate change and water security. As we look at listed growth gems, logistics has had some onetime issues with regard to specific areas and therefore, profit has been down, the revenue has been growing well. The business overall is in good shape. Hospitality and real estate have seen significant growth as they've overcome some of the issues of the past year, which were a little more COVID hit, and they are both on a strong trajectory right now. And as we talk about digital platforms, they continue to do well. FirstCry, CarandBike and Porter continue to increase in their valuations. The Digital FinCo is up and running now, and we are looking at a couple more in Agtech and receivables. These are vehicles to unlock value for the group. With that, let me invite Rajesh Jejurikar to take it forward. And while I do that, this time, we're also going to have the CEOs of our Auto and Farm businesses, Veejay Nakra and Hemant Sikka respectively. And what we will do is have them spend more time on the first and third quarter analyst meets, and Rajesh and I will spend more time on the second and fourth quarter. So that allows you to get a broader perspective from our leadership team. Rajesh, over to you.

Thanks, and good afternoon, good evening, good morning to everybody based on the country you're in. What you see here are the highlights of the Farm Equipment business, market share went up by 1.4 percentage points in the quarter. This was the second highest ever quarter 3 volume and PBIT. And that this reflects that we were on a very, very high base last year in quarter 3. We've launched the Yuvo Tech tractor on the Mahindra side and the CODE machine on the Swaraj side and Hemant will spend some time talking and explaining to you why we think the CODE by Swaraj is a real breakthrough concept. We have had 6 consecutive positive PBIT quarter for FES, and this has been the highest ever quarterly exports on the tractor side. Auto. This is the best in class. We've delivered a best-in-class margin way above the peers with a very strong booking pipeline of 155,000 open bookings. This includes the XUV700, which has open bookings of 70,000 at the moment. Total bookings were 100,000, but open bookings are 70,000 and multiple Cars of the Year award, Veejay will talk about that. Seeing a very strong growth on the EV 3-wheeler performance, which is highest ever quarterly billing and retail. And the trend and trajectory is going to be upward from here as the market penetration of electric 3-wheeler increases. The auto subsidiaries have improved their performance as well, and we've seen a strong export growth in quarter 3 in the auto side as well. Next. I'm not going to read the numbers. What you see here are the stand-alone and the consolidated revenues for quarter 3 and YTD, where stand-alone revenue grew by 9% in the quarter and 29% YTD and consolidated by 10% and 27%, respectively. Next. The PBIT in the quarter 3 was down stand-alone to INR 1,254 crores. But like I mentioned, quarter 3 of last year was a very high base for FES. And the consolidated PBIT is down 29% in quarter of F '22, again, reflecting the same high base on the FES side last year. On a YTD basis, the PBIT stand-alone is up 1%. And on a consolidated basis, the PBIT is up 16%, reflecting the turnaround on the farm international subs and an improved performance on the auto side as well. With that, I'll hand over to Hemant, who will take us through the Farm Equipment part.

Thank you, Rajesh. Good afternoon everybody. As we have spoken to you in the past that notwithstanding the cyclicity of the tractor industry, in Mahindra Farm Equipment Sector, we have always delivered stability in this volatility. And as you can see on the red line here that despite unprecedented, maybe first time in the post-war world, this kind of commodity inflation has happened. And in spite of that kind of unprecedented material cost pressures, we have been able to maintain a 17.3% PBIT, a margin here for this business. And in terms of our market share, we continue to maintain a leadership position. This shows 39.4% as the Q3 market share, but YTD, 9 months, our market share is 40.5%. So we have gained all the market share loss that we had last year because of supply chain issues, and we are back to 40-plus percent market share for Farm Equipment business. There are certain interplays of factors which are now playing out in the agricultural space. The government spending, even though it is still at a reasonable level, it is lower than last year. Last year, you would recollect that the government to support the migration of laborers from cities to villages and to support the farm labor, had come up with elevated spends, especially in MGNREGA and a few other schemes. All these have now been normalized. So compared to last year, this year the government spending is clearly lower than it was last year. So that has slowed down, and we see a strong correlation between the government spending and the tractor sales. The second factor, which is playing out is the terms of trade for farmers have distinctly become negative. As you can see from this chart, while the output prices have increased by 10%, the input inflation is 25%. So clearly, the money in the hands of the farmer is getting squeezed out. The third factor, which is playing opposite this is the 3-year in a row good monsoon that we have had. And this time, as you would recollect, the monsoon was actually delayed a lot. Now that was bad for the kharif crop because in many states, the standing kharif crop got destroyed. But it is very good for the winter crop because the moisture content in the soil was very high. And as a result, the sowing for the rabi crop happened very well. In fact, it is better than last year, and we are expecting a bumper rabi crop as the harvesting starts in next few weeks. If you lay these 3 factors: government spending, negative terms of trade and a very strong rabi output, which is expected to happen. Clearly, if we can get good monsoon this year, which will be fourth time in a year, fourth time running. I think overall, the next few quarters will play out how these factors play out. Overall, we are saying that in quarter 3, the industry had slowed down, and we are now looking at quarter 4, where again, the industry is preparing for a slowdown compared to last quarter 4. However, I must add that all the comparison is with last year, where we had unprecedented 27% growth in the industry last year, and the industry actually does 900,000 tractors. So this year also, I believe the industry will do a very good strong number. However, it will be lower than last year. Next slide, please. This is the product what Rajesh spoke about. We have launched this under the Swaraj brand, it is called CODE by Swaraj. You can see this is a very innovative product, and we believe that this product can totally disrupt the power tiller usage industry. Power tillers are not ride on ones. You walk behind them. They are very cumbersome to use. They topple at many times, huge farm trajectory and this is a machine where it is just like any other vehicle, you take it in your farm and it can work for both inter-culture as well as for cereal crops like paddy and wheat. The beauty of the machine is the innovative features. As you can see that we have very high ground clearance and it is adjustable. The ground clearance can be adjusted by 500 millimeters. So as the crop goes up, as you can see in the middle picture, you can keep taking your machine up and still continue to do inter-culture weeding and spraying operations. And you can adjust it upwards, downwards as the crop grows up. The third picture shows you that it is bi-directional. Just to help you understand, in the first picture, if you see the larger tires are on the back side, whereas in the third picture, the larger tires are actually front side. So that means the machine has turned around. And it is a very simple maneuver that you do to turn around the machine, and it works beautifully in both the directions. These are some of the features which I have showcased. There are many more features like that, and we believe this is a very innovative product. We have done a pilot launch in 3 states, and we have got excellent feedback from our customers. And now we are gearing up to go to next 10 states in this. We'll keep you posted on how this product shapes up, but very exciting times. Also want to talk to you about the whole tech play that we are developing in Farm Equipment Sector. Anish spoke about the whole agritech platform. And we believe that this aligns very well with the purpose of Mahindra's tractor business, which is to transform farming and enrich lives. We believe that with this technology, we can transform the farming in India. In this we have several use cases, but I would like to today share 3 use cases here. The first is our IoT platform, which is a purely IoT, AI in-house developed platform, which we have branded as DigiSense 4G. With this, you can actually -- a farmer can keep a track of all his tractors, multiple number of tractors while sitting at home or working at a very far distance from where these tractors are being used. We will show you videos to explain it. Similarly, we have a Nidaan app, which is a crop disease identification app. Here, the farmer just has to take the picture and upload it on our app, and we can tell which pesticide and how much quantity of pesticide is to be applied to get rid of this pest. And the smart harvesting is again a very cutting edge solution we have developed. This is purely based on algorithms that we have prepared to decode the satellite imagery. Some years back, we have spoken to you about our investments in startup across the world, and one of the company that we invested was specialized in decoding satellite imagery based in Switzerland called Gamaya. We have bought this entire proprietary knowledge. Now this is a Mahindra proprietary knowledge and our teams are fully equipped and trained to handle and build further on it. This tells the farmer by analyzing the satellite imagery of his farm, what is the best time to harvest the sugarcane. And this impacts the sugar recovery and even a 1% increase or decrease in the sugar recovery, you can imagine it's worth hundreds of crores for the farm mills. We have already signed up 6 sugar mills to demonstrate this technology on a pilot basis, and we are going to sign up many mill. So currently, we have more than 1,000 acres under our supervision. And we believe that the results that we are getting, this is also a very good technology, which has the potential to disrupt and transform the farming in India. Can we have the AVs, please? Anish, we're not getting the audio. [Presentation]

Okay. Let's move forward. This is the performance on our global subsidiary, as Rajesh spoke about, 6 continuous quarters of profitable growth. The MAgNA, which is our U.S.-based company, Mahindra Agri North America, the billing volume was 35% up, continues to maintain good profitability. Mahindra -- Mistubishi Mahindra Agri Machinery MAM in Japan. Again, the profit is better than last year. And both our companies in Turkey have delivered a very knockout performance in profit. For our Erkunt Traktor, it is the highest ever Q3 profit. And for our Erkunt Foundry, it is the highest ever, ever quarter on profitability. The third company, Hisarlar, has been divested as part of our capital allocation policy. And both the remaining companies in Turkey continue to do very well for us. In Brazil, our volume is up 80%. Market share in our segment of less than 100%, we continue to gain. The market share is now 4.6%. It is again the highest ever PBT there in Brazil. We are planning to launch South Africa in quarter 4 of FY '22. Next, please. And this slide you have seen over the last few quarters in F '19, F '20 when we had those challenges on the losses in our global subsidiary, you can see that F '21 onwards, major turnaround has been affected in all these companies, and we had a very small loss of [ INR 769 ] crores. And since then, in the last 6 quarters, our profit has improved and we are profitable continuously. So the turnaround has kind of become very, very structured there. There are a lot of structural changes done. And now we see continued path to profitability for our global subsidiaries. Next, please. Veejay, over to you, please.

Rajesh -- sorry, there's an echo, just give me a second, please. Sorry about that. Rajesh in his opening remarks on the auto business spoke about the success of the XUV700 and the strong pipeline of bookings, so I thought an appropriate slide to begin with would be to just share with you where we are on the 700 journey. We have now clocked 100,000 bookings in 4 months. We have already started seeing and receiving the accolades for the XUV700. And we thank Shutter Drive, IVA2022, Zee News, Motor Vikatan, autoX for recognizing this. And more so, Team-BHP, which in their internal method of voting to arrive at the Car of the Year, have called out XUV700 as the Car of the Year. Most of you all know that Team-BHP is a digital platform of auto enthusiasts. So you can clearly see that with a great margin, they've called out XUV700 as the Car of the Year. The other thing very quickly I want to cover on this is that we have 70,000 open bookings, and we continue to have a strong pipeline of bookings coming in on XUV700 despite the long-waiting period, especially on the high-end variants of the XUV700. Next slide, please. We were talking about a very strong pipeline of open bookings. We spoke about 155,000 plus. You can see that this total open booking is spread across products, XUV300, we continue to have a strong booking of 7,500 per month. In quarter 3, Bolero as a family, both the Bolero Neo and the Classic Bolero, 7,000-plus bookings every month. Scorpio, going strong with 5,500 bookings every month. Pik-up, very strong product with the highest market share in the category, again, strong booking of 14,000 per month and a strong opening booking. And even Thar after more than a year of launch now 15 months into launch, besides an open booking of 31,000, we continue to get over 4,000 bookings per month in quarter 3. At this stage, some of you all would have seen the new Thar commercial that we put out. We had it on CNBC and some of the news channels during the budget period, but we thought it may be an opportune time for us to share what we've done in terms of building the Thar brand by putting out the communication on the product. Can we have the TV commercial. Again, sound is not there, you might need to start again. [Presentation]

So we had this play out, both on the news channel as well as on social media. And very happy to see that the response was very, very positive to this commercial. Next slide, please. Two areas that I want to touch upon today. Both, I think, are areas which would be on top of your mind. One is focus on margins and second is focus on managing volumes. As far as focusing on margins is concerned, a lot of work has happened and continues to happen in the organization across all the 3 levers whether it is identifying every opportunity on material cost saving across products; fixed-cost optimization, something we've spoken about in all our meets and continues to be a major area of focus; and we've taken appropriate selling price increases through the year, including one in the month of January. When it comes to managing volumes, while we did have a loss of about 20,000 vehicles in quarter 3 because of semiconductor shortages, we firmly believe that if there are no new surprises that spring up, the worst is behind us. A lot of work has gone in to solve both short-term and medium-term in terms of semiconductor supplies. And I'm just going to touch a little bit more about this in detail in the next slide. So in terms of short-term actions, we've been talking about the supply constraint of ICs from Malaysia. We spent a lot of time talking about that in the last meet. Happy to say that we've identified new IC source, so that we are able to create fungibility across our products. And we are already seeing the benefit of that as well as sourcing ICs from the open market to help us create good reserve stocks as a result of which we are seeing the benefit already coming in, in the early days of February, and that gives us a lot of confidence going forward. On the medium term, there are certain things that we've done on the product development front, especially looking at how do we remove complexities of multiple function ICs on the ECUs and also look at alternate multi-sourcing of components on the ECU front. And with the short-term and medium-term actions in place, we believe that, as I did mention, the worst is behind us, we believe for the short and immediate term, we've solved to a very large extent, the constraints that we sit with. And going forward, with the improvement in the supply of semiconductors, we believe we will be able to get some operating leverage out of this into our financials with volume growth. With that, let me hand it back. Now let me hand it to Manoj. Manoj, over to you.

Thank you, Veejay, and thank you also for letting me use the laptop. I'm having some technical difficulties today. So quick snapshot of the numbers before we go into Q&A mode. I think we spoke about this overall revenue at INR 15,239 crores, a growth of 8%, led by auto and I think both Rajesh as well as Veejay talked about it in terms of the sector doing really well. On the EBITDA front, while this quarter has been impacted by the material cost and partially because of the supply constraints, I think going forward, I think there are -- we do see stability and there is some positive signs around the stability on material costs, and that should be able to in conjunction with what Veejay said, we're able to create some margin levers going forward. If you move to the next slide, please. At the PAT level, before EI translates from the EBITDA picture, where there is a decline of about 22%. At the after EI level, at the stand-alone, there are -- there is no EI this quarter. In quarter 3 F '21, we had some EIs as part of our capital allocation actions. So the INR 1,353 crores number, which is the PAT after EI for quarter 3 is a normal number without any EI for the quarter. If we look at the kind of the waterfall from last year same quarter to this year -- this quarter, I think clearly, both farm and auto have shown a decline in absolute terms because of commodity cost pressures and also because of some of the supply constraints, especially on the auto side. On the group companies, the performance has been about flat at a stand-alone level. And this is not the consolidated picture. This is just pickup we have for various things like dividends and so on and so forth. Moving to the next slide. At a consolidated level, again, auto leads the way with a 16% growth. As we spoke, I think this is coming across both domestic and export markets. I think both markets are doing well with great products and more products coming in the pipeline as we go forward. Farm at a consol level, I think there's a growth because the export markets have done well, and our international operations have done well in terms of revenue. And in group companies, we are seeing growth across multiple areas. So our hospitality business, our steel processing and business as well as some of the other businesses like logistics have done well, which is contributing about 8% growth at the consol level. At the PAT level, consolidated, I think a growth of 28%, which is a very significant kind of growth in terms of profits to INR 1,798 crores and at a PAT after EI level, it's a growth of about 57%. This quarter, we have had positive exceptional income largely because of funding round in one of our holding companies -- one of our investing companies, which is Porter. And as we had disclosed last quarter, Porter has a post-money valuation of 500 million, as part of that, about 100 million was infused into Porter. And this is the dilution effect and a pickup of that into our numbers. So that is causing this positive EI during this quarter. I think if I look at the walk forward, clearly, while auto and farm, we spoke about it. But I think in terms of the group companies, about INR 819 crores positive swing from quarter 3 last year to quarter 3 this year and largely because of the Mahindra Finance business, a large proportion of this is coming from there because it was in a position where there was a negative profit last year same quarter to a positive number this year, and that accounts for most of the swing as we look at it. So I think effectively, the other group companies have also done well, but the majority share is Mahindra Finance. With that, I think we have come to the end of the presentation and over to you guys for questions. Back to you, Sriram.

Yes. Thank you. So participants, please note that we -- today, we do have a hard stop at 2:55. So therefore, I request everyone to stick to your questions, I mean, as short as possible and stick to earnings call related questions as much as possible. With that, the first question is coming from Jinesh Gandhi of Motilal Oswal. [Operator Instructions]

Thanks, Sriram. Am I audible?

Yes, Jinesh you are. go ahead please.

Yes. So first, a couple of clarifications. One is on the Scorpio launch time line, so is it on track for fourth quarter launch? And second clarification on the media articles about demerger of tractor business, if you can clarify on those 2 things?

So Veejay, if you can take the first one, I'll take the second one after that.

We are looking at the launch of the Z101 towards the start of quarter 1 of F '23. I think largely because of some of the impact on semiconductors, but by and large on track. So it's not a major slip. We spoke about quarter 4, a couple of months moving ahead into quarter 1 of F'23.

And Jinesh, on the second point, I know there has been a lot of speculation. So while I will say that we will continue to look at all options to unlock value and everything is on the table, we are not looking at a demerger of the farm business at this point in time. We may consider a spin-off of the farm implement or the farm machinery business because that is one where we see a huge potential for growth and it may require a very different mindset in terms of driving that growth which can actually be a 10x growth in the next 3 to 5 years, potentially even more. But that, again, is not finalized as yet, and that is something that we will announce as soon as we finalize, but that is only for farm implements or farm machinery. We are not looking at demerger of the farm business right now.

Right. And second question pertains to Mahindra Group has applied for PLI and ACC batteries. So, are we going alone in this? Or are we having any partner and what kind of capital allocation do we plan for this?

So it is very unlikely, Jinesh, that we will go alone in this. The EV space still has a long way to play out. I've said earlier that we are likely in the first 5 or 10 overs of a test match. And what we are looking at is how is battery technology evolving, who are potential partners that can come in. And once we have all of that in place, then we will look at how we take that forward. So at this point in time, we do not have full clarity on that, but as soon as we do, we will share that, Jinesh.

Yes. I just want to add to that, Anish, no scenario will we be taking out majority in the setup. It is a potential play that we are considering depending on -- but we don't intend to leave that.

The next question is from Pramod Kumar of UBS. Pramod?

Yes, just a question on the auto sector. The order backlog of [ 155,000 ] is great. It tells a lot about the customer expectations on the product lineup and excitement, but the waiting period is too long. At current production run rate, it's well beyond 5, 6 months, which is not a -- never healthy thing. So what are the plans on production ramp-up, if you can quantify. By when do you expect to hit milestones like 25,000 or 30,000 in terms of monthly production run rates for SUVs. That will be really useful for us to model in because the order backlog is great, but we don't know what to do much on a quarterly basis with that because we don't know the production trend here. So if you can just help us understand the milestones and especially given that Scorpio will come in, it's one of your best -- I think I'll call it as the best brand for Mahindra in the SUV franchise and still going very strong after 20 years. So I expect great numbers on that product as well. That will only make your order book even larger and the waiting period longer. So if you can throw some light on the plans on the production side? And linked to that, is there long enough runway on the margin improvement side for automotive because the volume runway clearly looks pretty good at this point of time. But if you can make some comments on directionally, where do you aspire the margin should be given the strength of the product portfolio, and the fact that you are practically not facing much of competition, it's a very, very strong niche, where you're operating with the new lineup. So those comments will be very helpful, Rajesh and Veejay, and Anish as well.

Rajesh, do you want me to take that or...

Veejay.

Sure.

Maybe I'll get started, Veejay, and then you can comment. So Pramod just trying to stay with our general philosophy of not giving specific guidance on volumes, Veejay will talk more about multiple things that we are doing to improve the semiconductor situation. The situation has improved dramatically over the last 4 months. And we would start seeing a very good move in the direction of the numbers that we think. I'm going to, at the moment, avoid giving you an exact time frame because we keep seeing also a lot of volatility. But the way things are looking, it's not too far. Veejay?

Yes. I think 2 things. One, you're absolutely right that the waiting period is probably not very healthy, especially on some of the brands and more so on particular variants. But just in perspective, if one looks at any successful well-performing SUV brand in the market today, the general waiting is in the period of 4 to 6 months because I think there is a significant impact that cuts across the industry. But anyway, having said that, a couple of things on the semiconductor front that we've done. And like I said, first, let me talk about the short-term and immediate term what we've done as a result of which we are already seeing the benefit already in the month of February, which is why Rajesh said that while we're not looking at giving a guidance, we have a very high degree of confidence of getting to the kind of numbers you spoke about. So firstly, Malaysia was the biggest constraint that we kept talking about from the particular IC that we were sourcing from as a single source. We've already debottlenecked that by looking at multiple other sources. Not only that, we have taken the fungibility of that across our brands. That's one thing that we've done in the immediate short term. Second, as I did mention, sourcing of ICs from the open market, that too has helped us in a very big way. Number three, we've also looked at alternate sources for ECU. All of these are beginning to already show benefits because these were actions that we kicked out in the last 3 to 4 months. The other thing that I'll talk about, which is on the product development front, which is when we move to BS-VI, with the shift and advent of technology, there was a bundling of a lot of complex functions onto a single ECU and that, coupled with a single source is what led to the kind of complications we've had on the supply chain side. But with all that I've spoken about so far in the short term and now unbundling these complex functions on single ECUs, with the combination of all these actions, we've, A, derisked the supply chain going forward. So in the event of a similar kind of crisis that comes up in the future, we've debottleneck that and taken care of that. And at the same time, ensured that we solved for the short-term starting February and resolving for the medium term as we get into quarter 1 of next year. So I think all these actions put together will get us to the kind of numbers that you were talking about shortly.

[ Is there ] a follow-up, I don't know if we answered everything that you asked.

The second part was on the margin front, Rajesh.

Margin front, yes.

Yes. So I'll take that Pramod. We clearly are seeing a strong upside in auto margins over the medium term. These will be led by 3 things: operating leverage kicking in, the impact of pricing on new products as they stabilize because clearly we have seen when we have successful launches we build margins over a period of time; and a very structured cost reduction program that we have both on material cost and on other costs. So with all of these, we believe that in the medium term, we can get a margin upside of about 3% from where we are at the moment. So we are pretty optimistic about the margin upsides given the strong demand momentum and focus we have on cost.

Next is Gunjan from Bank of America.

Can you hear me?

Yes.

Okay. Two questions from my side. Firstly, on the auto business it is extension towards the [indiscernible]. What you point out is basically the supply chain constraints easing. But if I look at your Slide 27, right, where you put the sustainable run rate or monthly run rate you're seeing across models, this is almost double of what we are producing right now for most of the models. So what is it beyond the supply chain we're doing in terms of a capacity ramp up for some of these models from what I understand both for XUV as well as XUV700 plus the 300 the capacity is much lower than the run rate that you're seeing. So if you can give us some perspective, is there a case relooking at the capacities for these models as well?

I couldn't get a lot of what Gunjan said. If you did, can you just summarize the question. I did get gist of it, which was around Slide 27 and what else Slide 27 will translate into volume was broadly what...

Rajesh, her question was that if you look at the run rate of the average booking we are getting per month, her question is while you're sorting out the supply chain piece, how are you on the capacity planning to ensure that we don't -- the business doesn't have a challenge going forward?

So I think Gunjan, the answer is very similar to what we gave to Pramod. Veejay, you want to add something else?

No, Rajesh, I'll just add that capacity planning is a standard process in our -- in the organization. And as we -- the whole budgeting process takes the future into consideration, and it's a cyclical process of every time visiting capacity planning well in time to ensure that capacities don't become a constraint. So that's ongoing. And in some of our previous calls, we also mentioned about ramping up of capacity of certain products, and all of them are well on track.

Yes. I'll just add, Gunjan that, in this case, the demand has been far higher than what we've expected, having 100,000 bookings for the XUV700 already and having 50,000 in the first 3 hours was unprecedented. It really is a global record. And that has caused in some cases, a greater waiting period. We are putting in more capacities to meet with that, but the capacity ramp up realistically cannot be as fast as that.

Sure. Okay. Got it. That's what the concern sometimes comes to that there is a such a big wait period, and I know people are waiting -- [ being waited ] a wait period of 18 months which kind of worries to people wait that long, but it's good to see that response. The second question is on...

And Gunjan, just I missed on that, I would say that in some ways it's a good problem to have to have such a huge demand, but we do need to deal with that problem as well.

And Gunjan, just an add-on, as far the cancellations so far are at the rate of 10%.

Yes, so not too many cancellations, despite...

Not too many cancellations. And the 70,000 open booking includes the correction on cancellations. It's post cancellations.

Okay. Okay. Got it. The second question is on the farm business. I won't ask you for F '23 outlook. I know you won't share it yet, but at least from a margin perspective, can you just give us some more sense on what are the kind of price hikes or is there a case to take price hikes that given we're already seeing [indiscernible]. So how should we think about the margin trajectory? And also, if you want to revisit the F '22 industry guidance?

Gunjan, let me take that. So you would recollect the numbers from last year. Last year, the industry was at [ 900 to 1,000 ] with a growth of 27%. So this year, with all the interplay of factors that we are saying, the industry still will do very well. But compared to last year, which is on a very, very high base, we are expecting the industry to degrow this year by 6%. And in terms of the margin, you know that we have always said that we will maintain the best-in-class margin. We always give a range of margin from a 17% to 19% and we will play within that range. We have taken a price increases through the last 6 quarters, and we believe the last price increase was also taken on 1st of December as recent as that. We believe that the commodity inflation for FY '23 is looking benign. That will give us a better room to improve our margins than an immediate price increase. However, if the price increases are warranted, we will surely take that at the right time. So we are watching this space very carefully. And any opportunity which comes, we will look at that.

The next question is from Kapil Singh of Nomura.

Firstly, I wanted to check on the price increases, what is the average price increase we have taken across businesses. And is there further cost pressure that you'd see in the current quarter?

I'll take that, Kapil. So commodity outlook is benign at the moment, we expect the prices to be stable, not yet seeing a downward trend, but a downward trend will kick in over the next 18, 24 months, I'm not sure when that will happen. For the moment, we are assuming a benign commodity price outlook. On the tractor side, in F '22, we fully passed on all material costs. There's some backlog of F '21. On the auto side, we are ahead of what competitors have done by way of price increases. But we have passed on approximately 7.5% or 8% out of the 17% point-to-point material cost increase. So there is an unrecovered gap on the auto side, even though our price increases are faster than the industry. So we'll have to do a combination of costs, price increases and hoping for commodity prices to come downward, which we think will happen over the course of the next year.

Yes. Could you also talk -- I was actually looking forward to the price increase that we have done in December or January, the average price increase in auto and farm, if you...

In the quarter -- in this quarter?

Yes, in December or January, whenever you have done the recent ones?

Veejay, Hemant, do you want to just...

Sorry, auto took a 2.5% increase in January over and above the price increase that we had taken during the course of the previous quarters.

The tractor business took a 2% price increase on the 1st of December.

You may have this already. But in addition to that, the XUV700, as you know, had price increase after the first 25,000 and have to increase after the second 25,000. So as we come close to hitting that number of first 25,000, we start pricing higher for the next round of deliveries. And similarly, the Thar went through that as well. So we are effectively pricing higher for the Thar today than we were a few quarters ago.

Sure. Second, I wanted to check on the time lines for electric vehicle launches. We've heard about eKUV and eXUV. Broadly, I'm not looking for exact time frames, but broadly, are they both in FY '23? And also, what is the cost impact of CAFE norms for -- particularly for diesel or petrol segments for you? How well are you prepared to handle those?

Rajesh, you want me to take that?

Yes.

Okay. So on the CAFE front, we are prepared and we will meet the CAFE norms based on the combination of diesel, gasoline and the launch of the eXUV300, which happens next year so that is also in a sense, answers that question of yours. From a broad time perspective, it is scheduled for launch towards end of quarter 3, quarter 4 of F '23. I hope that answers your question.

I was also looking for the cost increase for diesel because of CAFE 2 norms?

CAFE, expect that in the [indiscernible] that is in the region of 10,000 or less.

It's about -- it ranges -- it varies from model to model, but it's in the range of between 8 to 12, So, Rajesh you're right at averages out.

I think there are a few more questions, but I think we're hitting the 2:55 time mark. I'm sure there are more opportunities for us in the next coming weeks to meet at different forums, so we could answer -- continue to answer your questions. At this point of the time, we have to close the conference here. Thank you, everyone, for joining the call and I look forward to meeting you again in the near future. Thank you, Anish, Rajesh, Manoj, Hemant and Veejay.

And thank you, everyone, for joining us today. Have a nice day.

Thank you.

Bye, everyone. Thank you.