You are Rohini Deshmukh, eleven days into the job as Head of Strategy at Aarav Mobility Systems in Pune, India. Three divisions are asking for ₹1,900 crore; the board has approved ₹1,200 crore. Before you split a single rupee, the strategy committee wants your opening posture on May 8.
The situation
Aarav makes powertrain components, control electronics and software modules for truck and off-highway manufacturers: ₹6,800 crore of revenue in FY2025 (about US$815 million), a 13.5% EBITDA margin, 9,400 people and 44% of sales exported to 22 countries. Combustion powertrain brings in 71% of revenue at a 14% divisional margin, but it is shrinking 6% to 9% a year, and two anchor customers have said they expect to halve their combustion orders within three years. The electrified and software-defined-vehicle lines are the other 29%: growing above 30% a year, at a −4% margin. They have bid for three vehicle-platform contracts in eighteen months and been shortlisted for none.
The three asks do not mention one another. Prakash Iyer's combustion division wants ₹900 crore to hold its business flat. Tanvi Menon's electrified line wants ₹480 crore to hire, to tool up and perhaps to buy a forty-engineer software firm. The international team wants ₹520 crore for a plant in Southeast Asia. Suhas Rane, the chief financial officer, has already warned you: every rupee left unallocated earns nothing, and he is the one who will have to explain it.
The risk committee has listed three discontinuities that could land inside the four-quarter cycle — a withdrawal of electric-vehicle subsidies that would revive combustion for a while, a fall in combustion orders faster than the trend, an anchor customer taking a module in-house — and refuses to say which. Planners estimate that a company still redeploying long after such an event gives up 6 to 9 points of its contested electric share, for good. The chair, Anil Barve, has given you four quarters and one sentence: make Aarav resilient by design rather than dependent on a single shrinking platform.