The Man Behind the Wheel — Tim Bouquet
Read: August 2026Subject: Onkar S. Kanwar (Apollo Tyres)
Core thesis: True industrial scale isn’t built by political networking alone; it requires operational resilience, geographical diversification, and bold global risk-taking during moments of crisis.
The 30-second core insight: Onkar Kanwar transformed Apollo Tyres from a single, union-plagued Indian factory into a $2B+ global giant by systematically decoupling production from local risk, professionalizing family leadership, and acquiring distressed global brands (Vredestein) long before Indian globalization was fashionable.
Key mental models:
| Pillar | The situation | Kanwar’s move | Universal lesson |
|---|---|---|---|
| Operational risk | Labor strikes paralyzed the primary Kerala plant in the 1980s | Built a second factory in Gujarat to break single-point-failure dependency | Never let a single operational bottleneck hold the enterprise hostage |
| Capital allocation | Operating under the restrictive pre-1991 License Raj | Acquired existing distressed licenses (Nirlon) rather than waiting | Find creative workarounds within rigid system constraints |
| Global expansion | Domestic price wars and commodity pressure | Cross-border M&A: bought Dunlop South Africa and Dutch brand Vredestein | Acquire premium R&D/brand equity in mature markets to upgrade margins |
| Leadership transition | Friction between relationship-driven father and systems-driven son | Fought for professionalized strategy over traditional patriarch control | Sentimental legacy must give way to institutional longevity |
The anti-fragile production principle: Labor union strikes threatened to bankrupt the single-factory Kerala operation. Rather than bowing to pressure, Kanwar used a multi-state footprint to hedge operational risk - “Apollo could not be held to ransom by unions.”
The global value step-up: moving from execution risk, to scale efficiency, to global R&D and margins.
Single factory (Kerala) → Multi-plant domestic (Gujarat/Chennai) → International M&A (Netherlands/Hungary)
The one that got away: Apollo came close to acquiring Cooper Tire for $2.5B in 2013 - bigger than Tata’s Jaguar Land Rover deal - and had already done much of the integration planning before it fell apart. Kanwar’s own framing of the failure: “You cannot regret, because everything happens for the best. Equally you cannot go forward if you are looking backwards. We didn’t look back. We said, ‘Let’s move on.’”
Quotes that stuck:
- “Onkar Singh Kanwar only knows one direction and that is forward. Whatever life throws in your path, you carry on, you stand on your own two feet and you follow your dream.”
- “The basic principles do not change when you become big but I remind the HR people that they must listen to staff. As I keep saying, listening is learning.”
- “A tyre is a unique combination of steel and rubber. The steel withstands the stresses placed on a tyre and the rubber takes care of the strain.”
- On punctuality: “Onkar is equally wedded to punctuality. To him turning up late shows lack of respect and lack of intent.”