Worrying cracks hiding behind MG Motor's own ‘house of Windsor'
Worrying cracks hiding behind MG Motor's own 'house of Windsor'
Synopsis
India's most successful EV is powering JSW MG's rise. But internal fragilities and external challenges threaten the fairytale.
By RAJIV GHOSH 8 Mins Read, Jun 16, 2025, 05:00 AM IST
SHARE THIS NEWS
Close
Font Size Abc Small
Small Abc Normal
Normal
Abc Large
Close
'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times' – reads the opening line of A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. The beginning of the famous 1859 novel perhaps best describes an automobile manufacturer in the country – Morris Garages India (now JSW MG Motor India). It is the best of times for the company, which has a vintage British lineage and a Chinese patronage through SAIC Motor Corporation, is smiling through the lanes of India's
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Time of India
32 minutes ago
- Time of India
British carmaker JLR trims FY26 margin forecast on US tariff concern
British luxury carmaker Jaguar Land Rover lowered its fiscal 2026 earnings before interest and taxes margins forecast to 5 per cent -7 per cent on Monday from 10 per cent earlier, amid uncertainty in the global auto industry as US tariffs loom. Shares in the company's Indian parent Tata Motors slumped as much as 5.2 per cent in early trade following the announcement. The revised EBIT margin forecast is also below JLR's reported 8.5 per cent margin for the previous fiscal year ended March 31. JLR added it sees free cash flow of close to zero in fiscal 2026. The company, which derives over quarter of its sales from the US, had temporarily paused shipments to the country after President Donald Trump slapped a 25 per cent duty on all foreign-made vehicles sold in the world's second-largest car market. The 'Defender' sport utility vehicle maker said it is re-allocating available units to "accessible markets", to boost profits. It added that it continues to engage with both the US and UK governments regarding a trade deal signed in May, which allows the UK to export 100,000 cars a year to the US at a 10 per cent tariff, below the 25 per cent levy for other nations. While JLR's " Range Rover " SUV lineup is manufactured in the UK, the popular "Defender" is made in Slovakia, a member of the European Union, which does not yet have a trade pact with the Trump administration. The carmaker said it is assessing pricing actions in the US to help offset the tariff impact. Analysts have said JLR may be less affected by the increased costs associated with the tariffs, thanks to a wealthier customer base that is unlikely to be deterred by a bigger price tag. However, Tata Motors remains among the most exposed Indian automakers to the US duties, as JLR lacks local manufacturing in the country, unlike most of its rivals, including German brands Mercedes-Benz and BMW.
Time of India
37 minutes ago
- Time of India
View: Chips won the Cold War. Rare earths may win the next
By David Fickling In retrospect, the symbolism of the moment was foreboding. On May 15, 2019, President Donald Trump signed an executive order banning US firms from doing business with Chinese telecommunications companies, including Huawei Technologies Co. Five days after that first broadside in a brewing trade-and-technology war, President Xi Jinping was photographed touring a factory producing rare-earth magnets. Such devices, his visit seemed to imply, could be a geopolitical weapon for China quite as potent as advanced semiconductors are for the US. Six years later, those battle lines are hardening. In the first major US-China trade dispute of Trump's second term, Beijing was able to use its control of rare earths to force Washington to a deal last week. The magnets produced from them are essential for the lightweight, powerful motors driving everything from automated car seats to guided missiles. After the US imposed its first round of tariffs in April, China started limiting export permits, causing US manufacturers to warn of imminent shutdowns. 'FULL MAGNETS, AND ANY NECESSARY RARE EARTHS, WILL BE SUPPLIED, UP FRONT, BY CHINA,' Trump said in a social media post Wednesday, announcing the trade deal had been finalized. Beneath the all-caps boastfulness there's a worrying note of desperation. America has been caught napping. Beijing's response to being frozen out of the microprocessor ecosystem was an all-out drive to bridge the technological gap. State-owned chip foundry Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. has deployed $33.5 billion on capital expenditures, and $4 billion on research and development, since the middle of 2019. Huawei spends 180 billion yuan ($25 billion) on R&D every year, founder Ren Zhengfei said in a recent interview. Just 12 months ago, the government created a separate $47.5 billion semiconductor investment fund. The US chip fortress still looks pretty impregnable, barring an unexpected DeepSeek moment. Although Huawei is reported to be developing a 3-nanometer chip to match the most advanced non-Chinese processors as soon as next year, Ren said its best designs still 'lag behind the US by a generation.' A lesson of asymmetric warfare, though, is to exploit your enemy's weaknesses, rather than attempt to match their strengths. That's where rare earths come in. A technological conflict is simply a disguised version of a real flesh-and-blood battle. As Chris Miller's 2022 book Chip War explains, the US advantage in semiconductors was a crucial factor in winning the Cold War. By making processing power incredibly lightweight and error-free, it enabled America to build a far more fearsome military machine. Cruise missiles guided by tiny onboard computers could destroy targets with pinpoint accuracy, rendering them more deadly than Soviet missiles that perennially veered off course. Rare-earth magnets promise to replicate that processing-power revolution in mechanical power — making motors smaller, stronger, cheaper, and more efficient. It's an innovative leap perceptible to anyone who's used a $25 drone: The tiny devices only exist today because of the way this new technology (along with the parallel revolution of lithium-ion batteries ) allows us to move objects in undreamt-of ways. As with cruise missiles in the 1970s, this innovation promises to change the way future wars will be fought. Consider Ukraine's bold drone strike on Russia's long-range bomber fleet earlier this month. Blinded by culture wars over the energy transition, America is doing far too little to close this technological gap. Its military needs for rare-earth magnets, as we've written, have been pretty much met at minimal cost. Compared to the hundreds of billions that China is pouring into chips , the Pentagon has built a rare-earth supply chain since the start of 2020 with $439 million in grants and loans. Worse is the way lithium-ion batteries are falling victim to politics. The looming repeal of Biden era clean-energy subsidies and the resultant collapse of the electric-vehicle supply chain may reduce the output capacity of US battery manufacturers in 2030 by about 75%. That would halt almost every plant not already under construction, and ensure the country can only produce enough cells to power about a fifth of annual car sales. America will be left more dependent on China, both for auto batteries and the host of more crucial niche applications for lithium-ion technology. In the golden age of semiconductors, the US instinctively knew that its strength as a great power lay in its determination to remain at the bleeding edge of innovation. When the might of the state forces technology to submit to ideology, though, the consequences can be disastrous. That's the road the US is heading down, however, in letting China take the lead in rare earths, solar panels, lithium-ion batteries and the other clean electrical technologies of the future. Should American troops find themselves on some future battlefield without the critical minerals and batteries to match the swarms of drones deployed against them, they'll rue the day Washington turned its back on the future.
Time of India
37 minutes ago
- Time of India
Nvidia's pitch for sovereign AI resonates with EU leaders
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has been pitching the idea of " sovereign AI " since 2023. Europe is now starting to listen and act. The concept is based on the idea that the language, knowledge, history and culture of each region are different, and every nation needs to develop and own its AI. Last week, the CEO of the artificial-intelligence chipmaker toured Europe's major capitals - London, Paris and Berlin - announcing a slew of projects and partnerships, while highlighting the lack of AI infrastructure in the region. In a place where leaders are increasingly wary of the continent's dependency on a handful of U.S. tech companies and after drawing ire from the U.S. President Donald Trump, his vision has started to gain traction. "We are going to invest billions in here ... but Europe needs to move into AI quickly," Huang said on Wednesday in Paris. On Monday of last week, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced 1 billion pounds ($1.35 billion) in funding to scale up computing power in a global race "to be an AI maker and not an AI taker." French President Emmanuel Macron called building AI infrastructure "our fight for sovereignty" at VivaTech, one of the largest global tech conferences. After Nvidia laid out plans to build an AI cloud platform in Germany with Deutsche Telekom, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz called it an "important step" for the digital sovereignty and economic future of Europe's top economy. Europe lags behind both the U.S. and China as its cloud infrastructure is mostly run by Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet's Google, and it has only a few smaller AI companies such as Mistral to rival the U.S. ones. "There's no reason why Europe shouldn't have tech champions," said 31-year-old Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch, sitting beside Huang, who has led Nvidia for more than three decades, at a panel at VivaTech. "This is a gigantic dream." Gigafactory plans unleashed In France, Mistral has partnered with Nvidia to build a data centre to power the AI needs of European companies with a homegrown alternative. It will use 18,000 of the latest Nvidia AI chips in the first phase, with plans to expand across multiple sites in 2026. In February, the European Union announced plans to build four "AI gigafactories" at a cost of $20 billion to lower dependence on U.S. firms. The European Commission has been in touch with Huang and he had told the EU executive that he was going to allocate some chip production to Europe for these factories, an EU official told Reuters. Nvidia's chips known as Graphics Processing Units or GPUs are crucial for building AI data centres from the U.S. to Japan and India to the Middle East. In Europe, a push for sovereign AI could reshape the tech landscape with domestic cloud providers, AI startups, and chipmakers standing to gain from new government funding and a shift toward in-region data infrastructure. Nvidia also wants to cement demand for its AI chips, ensuring that even as countries seek independence, they still rely on its technology to get there. Power costs The push is not without challenges. High electricity costs and rising demand could strain sourcing of electricity for data centres. Data centres account for 3% of EU electricity demand, but their consumption is expected to increase rapidly this decade due to AI. Mistral, which has raised just over $1 billion, is trying to become a European homegrown champion with a fraction of the money U.S. hyperscalers or large data-centre operators spend in a month. "Hyperscalers are spending $10 billion to $15 billion per quarter in their infrastructure. Who in Europe can afford that exactly?" said Pascal Brier, chief innovation officer at Capgemini, a partner of both Nvidia and Mistral. "It doesn't mean we shouldn't do anything, but we have to be cognizant about the fact that there will always be a gap." Mistral has launched several AI models which are used by businesses but companies tend to mix them with models from other companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta Platforms. "Most of the time it's not Mistral or the rest, it's Mistral and the rest," Brier said.
