Sona BLW / Sona Comstar

THE COMPANY BEFORE

The Kapur family's connection to precision gears began with Dr. Surinder Kapur's founding of Bharat Gears in the mid-1970s. The company made hot-forged bevel gears for the Indian automotive market — technically adequate but not exceptional by global standards. The critical technological upgrade came in 1995 when Surinder Kapur formed Sona Okegawa as a joint venture with Mitsubishi Materials Corporation of Japan, gaining access to warm-forging technology.

Warm forging — a process conducted at temperatures between cold and hot forging — produces components with near-net shape accuracy that reduces the machining required to reach final dimensions. The BLW division of ThyssenKrupp in Germany had invented this process and licensed it globally. When Sona acquired BLW itself in 2008, the company moved from being a licensee of warm-forging technology to its owner — a transformation analogous to the Ashok Leyland story of technology dependency converted into technology ownership.

By Sunjay's inheritance of the company in 2015, Sona BLW had world-class precision forging capability, global market presence, customer relationships with major vehicle manufacturers across India, Europe, and North America, and a technology foundation that was genuinely differentiated. It also had a balance sheet under pressure and a core product — the ICE differential gear — whose long-term market trajectory was unmistakably downward.

THE CRISIS

The crisis Sona BLW faced when Sunjay took over was a compound of the immediate and the structural. Immediately: financial stress from prior investment cycles required stabilisation. The company's debt-to-equity profile and working capital management needed correction before any strategic initiatives could be credibly funded.

Structurally: every major vehicle OEM in the world was accelerating their electric vehicle programmes. The European Union was tightening emission standards toward effective ICE phase-out. India's government was announcing EV incentive programmes. The global component supply chain was visibly reorganising around electric drivetrains. For a company whose entire existence was built on differential gears — components specific to ICE vehicles — the structural picture was an existential countdown.

The specific challenge was that Sona BLW had not participated in the development of EV drivetrain components. The motors, controllers, inverters, and battery management systems that define an electric vehicle's drivetrain were not in the company's product catalogue. Building capability in these areas from scratch would take years. Acquiring it would require finding the right assets and the capital to buy them.

The time pressure was real: the window in which a precision components company could position itself as an EV supplier — before the EV supply chains consolidated around established technology providers — was not indefinitely open. Sunjay had to move fast on a strategic initiative that required patience to execute. The combination of urgency and long time horizons is the hardest leadership environment in manufacturing.

THE LEADERSHIP DECISION

Sunjay Kapur's leadership decision was to make Sona BLW 'powertrain agnostic' — a phrase that captured the strategic intent precisely. Rather than betting the company on a single propulsion technology, he would build a product portfolio that was relevant regardless of whether the market moved toward full battery electric, mild hybrid, plug-in hybrid, hydrogen fuel cell, or any other propulsion variant.

The Blackstone partnership in 2019 was the catalyst that made the EV transformation fundable. Blackstone's acquisition of Sona BLW and its merger with Comstar Automotive Technologies — which Blackstone had separately acquired in 2018 — created Sona Comstar: a combined entity with differential gear expertise from Sona BLW and electric motor capability from Comstar. The merger gave Sona Comstar the EV component portfolio that Sona BLW alone could not have built quickly enough.

Comstar brought specific assets: the world's lightest starter motor (branded Photon), BSG systems for full-hybrid vehicles, BLDC motors for EV applications, zero PPM quality standards, and manufacturing operations in India, USA, Mexico, and China. The combination gave Sona Comstar credible products for both the ICE-to-mild-hybrid transition and the full EV conversion — covering the entire powertrain transition spectrum.

The subsequent acquisition of Novelic — a Serbian sensor and semiconductor company — extended the portfolio into sensors and software: the intelligence layer of next-generation vehicles. Acquiring a Belgrade-based deep tech company from Gurugram required both strategic clarity and executive courage. Sunjay brought both.

THE STRATEGIC PIVOT

The pivot from ICE-only component supplier to powertrain-agnostic EV-focused global mobility technology company was executed through four parallel workstreams: product expansion, geographic diversification, quality leadership, and customer diversification.

Product expansion moved the catalogue from differential gears to traction motors for EV applications, BSG systems for hybrids, sensors, transmission gears, and differential assemblies for electric drivetrains. The product portfolio went from one to ten categories within the Driveline Business alone during Vikram Verma's tenure as CEO of that division. Each new product was developed with a specific EV application in mind — not as an ICE product adapted for EV use, but as a solution designed from the start for the electric powertrain.

Geographic diversification took the company's manufacturing from India and Germany to India, USA, Mexico, China, and Serbia — matching the geographic spread of the global automotive OEMs that Sona Comstar was targeting. An EV component supplier that can deliver to a General Motors plant in Michigan, a Volkswagen plant in Germany, a Tata Motors plant in Pune, and a BYD plant in China from local production in each region is categorically different from an Indian exporter. Sona Comstar became the former.

The quality legacy was maintained throughout the transformation. The precision forging capability that had earned 85% market share in India and 25% in Europe was not sacrificed for growth. Zero PPM quality standards — inherited from Comstar's culture — became the Sona Comstar standard across all product lines and all geographies. This quality reputation was the credential that allowed the company to win EV contracts from OEMs that had never previously worked with an Indian supplier.

MARKET REACTION

The market reaction to Sona Comstar's EV pivot was enthusiastic in the investment community and measured in the customer community. The IPO in 2021 — at a time when EV excitement was at its peak globally — was met with strong institutional demand. The company's articulation of its powertrain-agnostic strategy, combined with the proven precision engineering capability, made it a credible EV supply chain bet.

Global automotive OEMs took a more deliberate approach. Qualifying a new supplier for EV components is a multi-year process — engineering evaluation, quality audit, sample production, pilot supply, full-volume qualification. Sona Comstar's European customer base, built over years of ICE differential gear supply, provided the initial EV contract wins. Expanding beyond the existing customer base required demonstrating EV-specific capability to OEMs that had not previously worked with the company.

The revenue trajectory validated the strategy: BEV revenue reaching 35% of total in FY2025, with ICE dependency falling below 10%, was the quantitative proof that the pivot was real and not merely a narrative. The company that had been built entirely on a product that electric vehicles did not need was generating more than a third of its revenue from products that only electric vehicles do need.

THE FACTORY FLOOR

Sona Comstar's factory floor culture was shaped by two distinct quality heritages: the precision forging discipline of the Sona BLW lineage, where gear geometry tolerances were measured in microns and any deviation produced drivetrain noise that automotive OEMs would not accept; and the zero PPM culture of Comstar, where starter motor failure rates were measured not in percentages but in parts per million of units shipped.

These two quality cultures produced something more demanding than either alone: a manufacturing organisation that expected zero defects in products requiring both mechanical precision and electronic reliability. Starter motors that fail at any point in a vehicle's life are field returns. Differential gears that produce noise are warranty claims. The overlap of these standards in the combined entity raised the quality floor of the entire operation.

The expansion to seven plants in India plus manufacturing in Mexico, USA, China, and Serbia required replicating these standards in diverse manufacturing environments. The methodology was systematic: quality engineers from the established India plants were deployed to bring up new facilities, using standardised work instructions, process control systems, and measurement protocols developed over twenty years. The 400-millionth differential gear — and the 6-million differential assembly milestone — are evidence of the scale at which these standards have been maintained.

The investments in EV-specific manufacturing — traction motor assembly lines, sensor integration capabilities, BLDC motor production — represent the next phase of factory floor development. Electric motors require different process controls than forged gears: cleanliness standards, insulation testing, electromagnetic balancing. Sona Comstar's factory floor is building these capabilities alongside its established mechanical precision capabilities.

THE RESULTS

The arithmetic of Sona Comstar's transformation is striking: a company that was 100% dependent on ICE vehicle drivetrains in 2015 had converted 35% of its revenue to battery electric vehicles by 2025, with a stated target of 78-79% EV revenue within the following five years. This is not product diversification. It is a complete strategic reinvention, executed while maintaining and growing the legacy business that funded the transition.

Sunjay Kapur did not live to see the full fruition of what he built. His sudden passing in 2025 left a company in capable hands — the leadership team he had developed, led by CEO Vivek Vikram Singh — but it also left a void that no succession plan fully prepares for. His legacy is the strategic framework he built: the powertrain-agnostic philosophy, the global manufacturing footprint, the quality culture, and the EV product portfolio that makes Sona Comstar irreplaceable in the electric vehicle supply chain regardless of which propulsion technology ultimately prevails.

THE PLAYBOOK MOVE

PLAYBOOK MOVE 6: Earn Global Validation

Sona Comstar earned global validation at every stage: in Germany with the BLW acquisition, in the USA with Comstar's zero PPM quality certification, in Serbia with the Novelic sensor company acquisition, and with every global OEM that awarded EV drivetrain contracts to an Indian-origin mobility technology company. Each international validation opened doors that domestic reputation alone could not open. The 25% European market share in precision forged differential gears was the credential that got Sona Comstar into conversations about EV drivetrains. Global validation compounds.

"We see a big future in electric mobility. Our goal is to be powertrain agnostic — it does not matter what propulsion technology prevails, we will supply the critical components for it."

— Sunjay Kapur (1964–2025), Chairman, Sona Comstar

FOR YOUR FACTORY:

If your core product became obsolete in ten years, what manufacturing capability would survive — and is that capability the foundation of your next business?