PMI Electro Mobility, an electric bus manufacturer, will invest around ₹40-45 crore in establishing four e-bus depots during the first quarter of FY24. Currently, it has 24 e-bus depots, the highest number of depots set up by any e-bus player in the country, with a total capacity of 40 MW, said Manvi Jain, Director, PMI Electro Mobility.
“Setting up charging infrastructure is mandatory if you have to run a bus in a particular State or city. Our buses are running in 24 cities; that means we have the depot infrastructure set up in these 24 cities. Going forward, we will add e-bus depots in Nagpur, Kerala, Rajkot and Goa over the next 3-6 months,” said Jain.
PMI has the widest network of presence in India among e-bus makers, and data from Vahan Portal show there are around 3,500 e-buses in India, out of which 916 are PMI’s. “As a result, we are the largest manufacturer of e-buses,” she said.
The OEM presently has nine variants of electric buses and now intends to introduce a 13.5-meter-long haul bus. Additionally, they would also include electric trucks in their portfolio over the next few years. “We will go into e-trucks, but not immediately, because there is enough demand for e-buses to cater to. In fact, in the next three to five years, 50,000 intra-city buses will be required in the country,” Jain told businessline.
In FY22, the company generated revenues of ₹380 crore, and expects a revenue of ₹850 crore this financial year. “We have an order pipeline of 1,500 buses from different States where we already do business. Currently, our scaling up of revenue will be from the intra-city business only, and if we are fortunate enough to add this inter-city, then it will be all cherry on the pie.”
Pilot run
PMI will launch its pilot run for its inter-city buses in six months. “We are looking at 6-8 months when we will start testing our product on the road, and we have interest from States that really want to run inter-city buses, such as Delhi, Jaipur and Maharashtra. We have been in touch with them and whenever we come up with a product, we would like to give them one or two buses so that they can actually run on the Indian roads and see how well they perform, and it can be decided by the government that all they need to do is put up the appropriate infrastructure,” explained Jain.
Currently, the company has a manufacturing facility in Dharuhera, Haryana, with a capacity of producing around 1,500 to 2,000 electric vehicles annually and would scale up to 3,500 electric vehicles annually in the next 18-24 months with the upcoming Pune facility. PMI Electro Mobility is a subsidiary of PMI Coaches Private Limited, a bus and coach manufacturing company.