Mahindra & Mahindra got its name because the founders couldn't afford new stationery
The company began in Ludhiana in 1945 as Mahindra & Mohammed, a steel trader. When partner Malik Ghulam Muhammad left for Pakistan in 1948, the two Mahindra brothers were stuck with paper and stamps marked M&M and no money to replace them. So they simply became Mahindra & Mahindra.
Brothers Kailash Chandra and Jagdish Chandra Mahindra founded the firm on 2 October 1945; the current group chairman, Anand Mahindra, is Jagdish's grandson. Its future lay in vehicles rather than steel. It began assembling Willys Jeeps under licence, starting with the CJ3 in 1954, and became India's Jeep maker, carrying on under licence as ownership of Jeep passed to American Motors in 1970 and to Chrysler in 1987. Light commercial vehicles followed in 1965, then tractors.
Tractors became the giant. Buying Punjab Tractor in 2007 made Mahindra the biggest tractor producer on the planet by volume, and it has since picked up tractor, harvester and farm equipment firms in Japan, Finland and Turkey, plus stakes in crop-imaging and precision-farming start-ups in Canada and Switzerland. On the road it is one of India's largest SUV makers, known for the Scorpio, the Bolero and the Thar, and its XUV300 earned a five-star adult rating in an independent crash test, the safest India-built car tested at that time.
Its foreign ventures have been mixed. It took over Kinetic Motors to enter two-wheelers in 2008, bought the REVA electric car company, and in 2015 agreed with its affiliate Tech Mahindra to buy 76.06% of Pininfarina, the Italian designer, for €168 million. Pininfarina later helped shape the Marazzo, a people carrier inspired by a shark. A majority stake in South Korea's SsangYong, acquired in 2011, ended in receivership after Mahindra stopped funding it in December 2020. Partnerships with Renault and Ford also came and went.
Headquartered in Mumbai and led by chief executive Anish Shah, it placed 18th on the Fortune India 500 in 2025, competing chiefly with Maruti Suzuki and Tata Motors.
Source: Mahindra & Mahindra
