Baba Kalyani Business Quotations

I am a very hands-on person, and I like to be involved in driving my business.

The year 2013 has been very difficult, with a lot of headwinds in almost every region and every business.

We can reorient our products and business strategy because we are an agile organisation.

We have got into Indian railways and are trying to get into the railway locomotive business in Europe and the United States.

Fundamentally, we have broken our aerospace business into three parts - large parts which go into the wings and fuselage, components for jet engines, and specialised structural components for landing gear.

The Indian business has largely grown on the back of exports. The domestic markets, as far as our Indian business is concerned, actually have contracted because of the contraction in the medium and heavy commercial vehicle space.

The period from 2002 to 2007 was probably our best period. We created a strategy to build global scale, footprints in each of the geographies and dramatically built our international business.

We passionately set up a programme that we call the Indian gun programme. I challenged Colonel Bhatia, who heads our defence business, that let's build an Indian gun. There's a belief that Indian companies aren't capable of this, and we want to prove them wrong, as we did in components.

When I returned from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1972, my father was running a forging business with a turnover of Rs 3.5 crore. But I had no patience and wanted to grow the business via exports.

I had the option of building a career in the U.S. Many of my friends who went at the time did not come back, but for me, building the family business and being with family was worth it. I became a general manager within four months, as I used my education to improve productivity and output.