Of direct relevance to the earlier discussion about India, I noticed just last Friday RattanIndia released an announcement relating to their acquisition on Revolt Motors.
Curiously, RattanIndia's view around the future prospects of the Revolt brand seems to be at odds with my own earlier assessment. The extract below is taken from the announcement:
...New Delhi, January 14, 2023: RattanIndia Enterprises Limited has completed acquisition of 100% shareholding in the electric motorcycles market leader Revolt Motors. Henceforth, Revolt Motors will be 100% wholly owned subsidiary of NSE/BSE listed RattanIndia Enterprises Ltd. Revolt Motors is the highest selling electric bike in the country with its manufacturing facility in Manesar, Haryana.
Revolt Motors has expanded its footprint pan-India with 30 dealerships spread across the country. With this 100% acquisition of Revolt Motors, RattanIndia Enterprises seeks to significantly scale up Revolt’s growth and make it the largest EV two wheeler company in the country. Revolt Motors flagship model RV400 has been witnessing a robust demand and is by far the most technologically advanced bike in the world. These AI-enabled electric motorcycles capture millions of data points per second over-the-air to deliver great driving experience to the riders.
Revolt bikes also known for their superior build quality have already completed over 20 crore kms on Indian roads. India is predominantly a two-wheeler country with motorcycles leading the way. Cost conscious Indian bike customers see value in Revolt bikes which offer a huge cost advantage vis-à-vis petrol bikes with running cost being 1/10th of a petrol bike...
Judging from the above, the RattanIndia management don't seem to be particularly concerned about the cloud that is hanging over Revolt in relation to the alleged violation of the guidelines of the FAME incentive program. Is this just spin, or are they genuinely confident that this isn't a long term issue?
One point worth bearing in mind here is that the FAME incentives are currently set to end in March 2024, which isn't really that far off (assuming the program doesn't end up being extended). So if the RattanIndia management are playing a long-game, the optimism expressed in the above announcement might not be entirely confected.
This in turn might also explain why Vmoto don't seem to have yet given up the ghost in this part of world. To be eligible for the FAME payments, vehicles need to source at least 50% of their components from Indian factories, and so Vmoto's products certainly wouldn't benefit. As such, Vmoto's plan might be to lie low, so as to wait out the incentive program, which has been providing the local competitors with an edge.
One aspect that is odd in relation to this pertains to the timing.
The RattanIndia takeover of Revolt, announced in October 2022, seems to closely accord with Vmoto's arrangement with Future Motor Corporation. According to the above posts by Afd/Pods, that FortuneEV company (which is apparently the parent company of Future Motor) was incorporated the month following on from the announcement of the Revolt takeover, in November 2022.
I think there could be two possibilities that might explain the strange correlation in these dates.
The first possibility is that Vmoto might be planning on cutting Revolt loose, taking advantage of their recent misfortunes around the FAME scheme.
It has been long suspected that that the Revolt bikes are constructed out of parts supplied from the Vmoto factory. So perhaps Revolt have served as an unwitting lab-rat, testing the Indian market while the Vmoto management observed from afar, and now, with the viability of the product having been been confirmed, Vmoto have perhaps now decided to wade in and pick up where they left off.
The problem with that theory is that it doesn't explain the sunny outlook of the RattanIndia management in the Friday announcement relating to Revolt (unless, of course, you take the cynical view that this is all just puffery for the market).
The other possibility is that the correlation between the timing of the RattanIndia takeover of Revolt and Vmoto's partnership with this Future Motor Corporation might indicate some type of coordinated strategy between the management of RattanIndia and Vmoto.
That would seem to make sense: it is hard to otherwise fathom why Vmoto are going into India and trying to compete with Revolt, selling a motorcycle model (the TS) that is fundamentally the same as the Revolt RV400 (Note here that I am assuming that Vmoto are supplying CKD kits that make up the Revolt bikes, but this assessment would seem to marry wiith the evidence).
It is difficult to pin down exactly what is going on in India, however, it hard not to shake a suspicion that there might be some back-room dealing going on between RattanIndia and Vmoto. I wouldn't be overly surprised if the two end up as partners in some manner of joint venture, perhaps aimed at building a factory in India.
Before I wind up, there was one other point I thought I should briefly mention here.
@HarkenBanks, I think you are right to raise the issue of duplicate accounts on this forum. It is a problem, and indeed, I suspect it is more pervasive than most of the regulars here realise.
However, one word of caution. Personally, I'd be wary about directly calling out the posters who you think might be fakesters.
There are two reasons I say this. Firstly, although dupe accounts tend to share certain features in common, sometimes, genuine posters just happen to fit the bill.
To give an example, on this forum, Kleuskenn has been accused a few times of being the smurf of another user, however, I am not entirely convinced about this. My assessment on this could be wrong, however, until I see faitly strong evidence indicating that a poster is a smurf, I will generally give posters the benefit of the doubt.
The second point is that the people who use fake accounts on Hotcopper sometimes go to extraordinary lengths to protect their muppet accounts.
Long termers here would probably remember the negative nelly who used to post on this forum years ago. What most here wouldn't be aware of is that this disgruntled poster was posting on this forum using a number of different accounts.
I picked up on this after the doomster inadvertantly gave the game away one time. After I submitted a post one day, within a matter of minutes another poster popped out of the ether, hurling derision and bascially being a troll.
Within an hour, the post was self-moderated by the user. But this wasn't due to embarrasment about his conduct, rather, it was because it was obvious from some of the comments in the post that this particular poster was being operated by the well-known negative nelly who used to haunt the VMT forum. In his haste to rubbish my post, he had let carelessly let a few things slip which gave him away.
Anyway, what amazed me about this is that this particular duplicate account had racked up more than 1,000 posts on Hotcopper. I estimate that the guy must have been posting with this fake account for years and years, which explains why he was so quick to self-moderate that post when he realised he had given the game away. (Incidently, this is why I tend to be wary about posters who engage in excessive self-moderation: It can indicate that someone is posting using a secondary account, and that they are sensitive about being caught out, hence they try to cover their tracks by regularly deleting posts that they think might contain clues that inadvertently expose a link between their fake account and the real one).
Rounding up, I do think it is important to highlight the issue of the duplicate accounts that infest this forum, and I think this is a good thing. Posters using multiple accounts are doing so for purely self-interested reasons, and to the detriment of the genuine posters.
However, I would tend to steer clear of naming the suspect accounts as much as is possible.
Unfortunately, the bad-apples who are playing around with numerous dupe accounts often go to extraordinary lengths to try and protect their weird frankenstein creations, and so if you try to expose the phony accounts, sometime posters innocent of any wrongdoing inadvertently get caught up in the firing line, while some of the fakesters will manage to escape detection.
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VMT Price at posting:
40.0¢ Sentiment: None Disclosure: Held
(20min delay)
