Vikram Lal and Family

Royal Enfield was selling 2,000 motorcycles a year when Eicher acquired it. The decision that changed everything was to make fewer models, not more.

Royal Enfield has been in continuous production since 1901, making it the oldest motorcycle brand still manufacturing today. The Eicher Group, which Vikram Lal built from a tractors and trucks conglomerate, acquired Royal Enfield's Indian operations in 1994 when the brand was producing fewer than 2,000 motorcycles a year and was considered a marginal asset. His son Siddhartha Lal took over the management of Royal Enfield in 2000 and made a series of decisions that proved collectively consequential: he reduced the model range sharply, invested in a new engine platform, raised manufacturing quality and repositioned the brand toward the mid-size segment that premium enthusiasts in India and abroad were underserved in.

Royal Enfield now sells over 900,000 motorcycles annually, exports to more than 60 countries, and commands pricing that its peers in the mass-market two-wheeler segment cannot approach. The turnaround required resisting the temptation to expand the model range or chase volume, which would have been the conventional response to a struggling brand. The discipline to do less, more carefully, over a long period is rarer in manufacturing than it sounds.