Balkrishna Industries (BKT)

A fight everyone agreed to have

In the mid-1990s, the Indian tyre market was sliding toward a brutal, low-margin price war. Everyone could see it coming.

And everyone agreed on the playbook: cut prices, pour money into marketing, and scrap for every inch of domestic market share. It's the obvious move. It's also a move where the prize for winning is a thinner margin than you started with.

The Poddar family, who ran Balkrishna Industries, looked at that fight and made a quietly radical decision. They decided not to be in it.

Looking where no one was looking

Instead of fighting for Indian car and bike tyres, BKT pivoted to a corner of the market almost no one in India took seriously: Off-Highway Tyres.

These are the specialised, unglamorous giants — rubber for farm tractors, mining trucks, and port equipment. A global niche dominated by names like Michelin, Bridgestone, and Trelleborg. No Indian manufacturer had ever really tried to compete there.

It was a harder road. Off-highway tyres are low-volume and high-complexity. A paddy-field tractor in Vietnam needs a different tyre than a haul truck in an Australian mine. But that complexity was the whole point: it kept the price-war crowd out. You can't win a race to the bottom in a business where every product is bespoke.

Three decades later

The patience paid off in a way that's almost hard to believe for a company that started by avoiding its home market:

• BKT now sells in 160 countries.
• Europe alone generates more revenue than all of India.
• It makes 3,200+ tyre variants — from those Vietnamese paddy tractors to Australian haul trucks.
• Revenue grew from ₹5,210 Cr (FY19) to ₹10,447 Cr (FY25).
• It's now a top-5 global player in off-highway tyres.

The market capitalisation today sits around ₹48,000 crore — built almost entirely on a market its domestic rivals ignored.

Knowing which fights to skip

The instinct in a tough market is to dig in and fight for every inch. It feels brave. It feels like leadership.

BKT's story is a reminder that the bravest move is sometimes the opposite: to look at a brawl everyone expects you to join, decide the terms are bad, and go win somewhere else entirely.

Knowing how to win a fight is valuable. Knowing which fights aren't worth winning is rarer — and, as the Poddars proved over three decades, it can be worth ₹48,000 crore.