The company’s 37-year-old chairman Sudarshan Venu is accelerating market expansion with an EV push and a range of luxury wheels under British heritage brand Norton.

On a May morning, TVS Motor Company’s factory on a 120-hectare campus located in the industrial enclave of Hosur in south India is bustling with activity. Workers attach handlebars to two-wheelers moving along a conveyor belt. Driverless vehicles transport materials across the gleaming factory floor. And in one section, 1,200 cc engines are being assembled for the company’s new superpremium motorbike, the Norton Manx R, one of four new models from the historic British brand now owned by TVS Motor and set to go on sale later this year.

The scene reflects the ambitions of Sudarshan Venu, 37, chairman and managing director of the $18 billion (market cap) company with consolidated revenue of $6 billion for the year ended Mar. 31, 2026, and the fourth generation scion of the storied TVS group clan. In keeping with the custom in South India, he draws his surname from the first name of his father, Venu Srinivasan, 73, an industry stalwart who built TVS Motor over half a century into a dominant producer of affordable two-wheelers in India as well as in emerging markets across Asia, Latin America and Africa. The patriarch owns roughly 36% of the company and is on the Forbes’ World’s Billionaires list of 2026 with a fortune of $6.2 billion.

Now Sudarshan is injecting fresh energy into TVS Motor as he looks further afield and in new directions, specifically electric motorcycles and elite machines. His ambition “is inspired by my grandfather and my father whose vision was to create a leading, global two-wheeler player,” he says in an interview at the company’s office in Singapore, from where he travels to India and elsewhere two weeks every month. In 2018, Sudarshan took up residence in the city-state, viewing it, he says, as “a good place to build a more global company.”

In a notable shift, TVS Motor edged out Japan’s Yamaha Motor to become the world’s third-largest maker of two-wheelers based on 5.5 million units sold in calendar 2025, behind Honda Motor, also Japanese, and Delhi-based Hero MotoCorp, controlled by billionaire Pawan Munjal. The company, which makes two- and three-wheelers in engine sizes ranging from 100 cc to 1,200 cc across a dozen categories, from scooters and commuter motorbikes to sport, adventure and exclusive wheels like Norton, is also the No. 3 two-wheeler maker in its home market.

As Sudarshan retools the company, he’s aiming to boost production to 8.3 million units in the year to March 2027, up 41% from fiscal 2026 and more than double the output in 2021. To achieve that target he’s earmarked 35 billion rupees ($370 million) for capacity expansion, EV development, product launches and scaling global subsidiaries, bringing total capex spending since 2024 to 133 billion rupees.

It’s all part of a roadmap Sudarshan and his father, who stepped back to become chairman emeritus in 2023, prepared six years ago. “Many of the things that we have done, be it investing in electric [two-wheelers], the global push, the greater premium push and the focus on innovation, are…in line with the vision that we came up with in 2020,” says Sudarshan, adding that his father continues to give guidance and is “always focused on customer delight, technology and innovation.”

“We live in a very volatile environment. It’s uncertain both presently and possibly for a period of time. So we have to manage the risks as we go along.”

“We live in a very volatile environment. It’s uncertain both presently and possibly for a period of time. So we have to manage the risks as we go along.”

Sudarshan has led the company “through a period of significant achievement, driving growth across our businesses with speed and conviction, pursuing acquisitions that have extended our reach across markets,” his father says in an email.

The Indian market for two-wheelers is the world’s largest by number of units, with 21.4 million sold in fiscal 2026, according to the Federation of Automobile Dealers Associations, a New Delhi-based trade group. It is expected to expand to 27.6 million units by 2030 says a report by Chicago-based consulting firm Kearney, which cites low household penetration, the surging gig economy and the country’s rising urbanization as growth levers.

TVS Motor, which has three factories in India and one each........

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