Sona Comstar's Priya Kapur says deep focus on EV innovation with co spending 3% revenue on R&D

India is no longer an alternative manufacturing base but has emerged as a key pillar in global automotive decision-making, Priya Kapur, Non-Executive Director at Sona Comstar, said on Wednesday, February 11.

Addressing industry leaders and policymakers, Kapur said the country’s automotive sector has moved decisively beyond low-cost manufacturing and is now central to global OEM strategies as companies rethink supply chains around resilience, engineering depth and execution reliability.

She said the auto component industry has undergone a structural shift from build-to-print execution to technology-led co-development and system-level capabilities, supported by policy stability and initiatives such as the government’s Production Linked Incentive (PLI) Scheme.

Kapur was speaking at a session titled ‘Make in India, Compete Globally: Transforming Auto Supply Chains for Global Excellence,’ at the 60th ACMA Excellence Awards & Technology Summit, which was attended by senior industry leaders and policymakers.

The comments come at a time when global automakers are accelerating the transition to electric mobility and reworking supply chains to secure EV-focused technologies, engineering depth and execution certainty.

Kapur noted that the late Sunjay Kapur anticipated the shift to electrification well before electric vehicles entered mainstream global discussions, a move that she said proved decisive for the group.

She said sustained investments in research and development followed, pushing battery electric vehicle revenues to 36% of total product revenues in FY25 and helping build a $2.8-billion order book, of which 77% is linked to EV programmes. Kapur added that Sona Comstar continues to invest around 3% of its revenues in R&D, reflecting the belief that technology leadership must come before market leadership.

Sona Comstar’s journey from crisis to global EV play

Recounting Sona Comstar’s journey, Kapur recalled the company’s challenging phase in FY2015, later documented in a Harvard Business School case study. During the period, German sales had halved, cash was locked in inventory even as a $120-million loan had to be serviced, and liquidity had nearly dried up. The US plant was losing nearly half a million dollars every month, Indian revenues were largely domestic at around ₹345 crore, and the company stood on the brink of insolvency.

She said the crisis forced the organisation to confront hard truths and fundamentally rethink its strategy, ambition and future.

Tracing the turnaround, Kapur outlined Sona Comstar’s transformation from a domestic precision forgings supplier into a global mobility technology company, with manufacturing and R&D operations across India, the US, Mexico, Serbia and China.

The shift was anchored in three pillars: expanding into technology-led products, aggressive global diversification, and early bets on electric mobility.

From a single-product focus on differential gears in 2015, the company now offers over 22 advanced products across driveline systems, traction motors, sensors and next-generation mobility technologies.

Concluding her address, Kapur paid tribute to her late husband, Sunjay Kapur, recalling his belief in venturing beyond comfort zones to build with purpose and scale globally. The former chairman of Sona Comstar died on June 12, 2025, at the age of 53 after suffering a heart attack while playing polo in the UK.

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