From capital allocation discipline to bold bets: How Anish Shah steered Mahindra Group over last 5 years

When Anish Shah took over the reins of Mahindra Group as the first non-family MD & CEO in the conglomerate’s history five years ago, there was skepticism. Mahindra & Mahindra, the best-performing stock on the NIFTY 50 for 17 years from 2002 through August 2018 by returning a phenomenal 31% CAGR year-on-year, had seen a decline in valuation. And Shah, who had spent 14 years at GE Capital, was seen as someone who would bring GE’s performance-based culture to one of India’s storied groups which was known for its bold and entrepreneurial bets.

“There were a lot of questions. A lot of people who were looking at me coming in were saying: Will we still be the same Mahindra that we were before, or will we become GE? I'd spent many years at GE, and that was an actual question that I had heard from the grapevine, saying that I would bring the GE culture in, and we would become only performance oriented. That was a real concern that people had,” Shah said at the Business Today MindRush & India’s Best CEOs Awards.

Shah, who completed five years at the helm of M&M on April 2, 2026, took the first few years to convince skeptics by his actions. His commitment to shareholders of getting to 18% Return on Equity (ROE) was achieved in just one and half years. Early on during his tenure, Shah kept a single-minded focus on capital allocation discipline.

Under his leadership, the Mahindra Group exited 15 underperforming businesses, including large and complex ones like SsangYong Motor Company. These weren’t easy decisions, but they sent a clear signal internally and externally—capital would have to earn its place. The clean-up freed up capital and management bandwidth for sharper business focus. In FY26, M&M continued portfolio pruning through exits such as Sampo and Mitsubishi Mahindra to prioritise high-ROCE businesses.

But this doesn’t mean that Shah is shying away from making bold bets. To make Mahindra Group future-ready, Shah brought in investors like Temasek and British International Investment (BII) in the company’s electric vehicle arm, Mahindra Electric Automobile Ltd, to launch series of born-electric cars, making it India’s second-largest EV maker by volume in March 2026 and the biggest EV maker by revenue.

Bold bets, the core DNA of Mahindra Group, has continued. Last year, M&M acquired a majority stake in commercial vehicle maker SML Isuzu to deepen its core auto business. M&M also forayed into life insurance by forming a joint venture with Canada’s Manulife. For the first time, 80-year-old M&M toppled South Korea's Hyundai Motor India to emerge as the second-largest carmaker by volume in the Financial Year 2025-2026.

“When I came in as a first non-family member after 75 years with Anand Mahindra. The plan was to ensure what we call continuity in change, and there had to be a set of things that we kept constant and some things that we changed,” he told BT. “What we did change was bring in three behaviors that we wanted each of our associates to drive. One is being bold, and that's something we've done in everything that you've seen, which is set higher targets, in some ways, aim for the sky, but be realistic and grounded in doing that as well, and giving our leaders the freedom to do that, the courage to do that, the safety net if something doesn't work as it was supposed to, that's about being bold,” he explained.

“The second is about being agile. We realise that in the world today, a large conglomerate will fall into its own trap and its own bureaucracy. If it's not agile, we are competing with start-ups, and for that, we have to be able to drive that level of agile decision-making. And there have been a number of key decisions that some of our leaders would tell us, that we made, literally in five minutes, and we've gone ahead with it,” said Shah.

And the third is about being collaborative as a federation. “We've given freedom to our leaders, but we also emphasise that for us to be able to harness the power of the group, we have to work together. We want to help each other succeed, and that collaboration is most important. So bold, agile and collaborative are the three things that we've emphasized as we continue this journey,” said Shah.

Shah wants the entrepreneurial spirit of the Mahindra Group to stay as the journey continues. “One of the things that we've seen about entrepreneurs is that they don't care about quarters that the stock market cares about, and that is one that I've had to adapt,” admits Shah. “And I tell our investors that don't look at quarters for us. We don't care about quarters. We're building a business here for the long term. Decisions we are making are about 15-20 years in future by the value creation that we will have for investors in 15-20 years. We have been lucky that we've done very well every quarter for the last five years,” he said.