[surjaonwheelz]

According to Business Standard,

Dasari takes over from Siddhartha Lal as Enfield’s CEO. Lal will continue as managing director (MD) of Eicher Motors.

Dasari comes from Ashok Leyland, the commercial vehicle major, where he was in a leadership role since 2005, the past eight years as MD.

Lal said, “After a phenomenal success story in the last decade, Enfield is building the foundations of its next level of growth... there is no better person than Dasari to lead Enfield into its next phase of evolution to a global brand. Vinod’s are precisely the qualities Enfield needs as it aspires to lead and catalyse the global motorcycling industry towards middle weights (250-750cc).”

Enfield will invest Rs 700 crore in 2019-20. The planned capex will include completion of underconstruction technology centre’s phase-2 at the Vallam Vadagal plant in Tamil Nadu, and towards the development of new platforms and products. Also, Enfield plans a production of 950,000 motorcycles for 2019-20.

Lal said, “This year Enfield will focus on the transition to the BS-VI emission norms along with strengthening product development capabilities and working towards new global platforms. The phase-2 of our Vallam Vadagal plant is expected to commence commercial production in the second half of this financial year.”

RE sees a change in leadership, first Rudratej Singh and now Sid Lal himself! All this after the successful launch of the RE Twins. Many more challenges ahead in the form of BS-VI norms and leveraging from new product platforms.


--surjaonwheelz

[rrsteer]

This is interesting. Mr. Vinod left the position of CEO of a company 3 times the size of Royal Enfield to join them (must have asked big bucks in return). In addition his experience seems to be more on the industrial side and not on the consumer auto side. And recently, the other senior management fellow who left RE was a hardcore sales & marketing professional with no manufacturing background. As the press release notes, probably they needed someone with solid manufacturing leadership experience.

[timuseravan]

Originally Posted by rrsteer

As the press release notes, probably they needed someone with solid manufacturing leadership experience.

Absolutely!! RE's number 1 priority should be reliability.

[gkveda]

I will be happy if this change brings following transformation in enfield (yes, I mean transformation)

1. Vibration in enfield reduces
2. Enfield becomes more reliable
3. ASC gets well informed mechanics
4. Enfield stops leaking oil surrounding itself
5. Gets alloy wheels and tubeless tyres

[Skidrow]

Vinod Dasari is an engineer as opposed to a salesman having been in Cummins and Timken before Ashok Leyland.

His appointment might be a strategic decision possibly because of the challenges that the single cylinder air cooled 350 cc lump (which is the bread earner in various avatars) faces in meeting BS VI. He may have the background to be able to push this through.

The single cylinder Classic/Thunderbird etc are heavy underpowered bikes and this poor power to weight ratio may be further accentuated if they have to do aggressive modification in order to meet emission standards which come in less than twelve months. These modifications will affect driveability and hence sales.

The new liquid cooled 650cc engines should go through fine.

[Venkatesh]

Eicher Motors has announced that Vinod K Dasari has decided to step down as the CEO of Royal Enfield and Executive Director of the Board of Eicher Motors with effect from August 13, 2021.



Replacing Dasari at Royal Enfield will be B. Govindarajan, who has been appointed as the Executive Director and will lead the motorcycle maker from August 18, 2021. He was previously the Chief Operating Officer at RE since 2013.

Source

[Dhillon]

Royal Enfield's sales started to decline in 2019 and COVID hit them hard. Once they were doing more than 60K (2018) units a month and were hopeful to reach a million units by 2020 (currently they do about 40K units a month but have the capacity to manufacture a million units from the 3 plants combined). Also, they opened way too much dealers in cities like Delhi which resulted in competition between the dealers. And mind you, in 2018-2019 350cc-500cc segment was growing more than the sub 100cc segment. Mr. Dasari's past is more from commercial automobile industry so I guess this was not meant for him. Maybe!