Bajaj Auto, based like Tata Motors in Pune, is another developing-country brand going global.
For a while it looked as if a newly revved-up Bajaj would reclaim the crown.
Bajaj Auto, a maker of scooters, motorcycles and three-wheelers, has had a similar experience with liberalisation.
Whereas Tata aimed for a huge emerging middle class with a massive engineering project, Bajaj deliberately started small.
By reading the market correctly, Hero Honda was able to finally topple long-standing scooter king Bajaj in 2001.
To recover lost ground, Bajaj drew on technology from Kawasaki and jazzed up its portfolio, emphasizing premium motorcycles.
Last year Mr Bajaj launched a chain, Bajaj World, mostly for rural areas.
Bajaj is an Indian firm known for its scooters, motorcycles, and three-wheeled vehicles.
Obesity represents "a desperate need, " says Jaideep Bajaj of consultancy ZS Associates, which advises drug firms on marketing matters.
Cigarette maker ITC gained 0.4% to 305.45 rupees, while two wheeler manufacturer Bajaj auto rose 1.2% to 1835.40 rupees.
Mr Bajaj draws a comparison between the company's policy now and before 1991.
Its Bajaj Auto, India's second-largest motorcycle maker, run by sons Rajiv and Sanjiv, is closing gap with rival Hero Honda.
Losers were led by Bajaj Auto, maker of two- and three-wheel vehicles, down 7.4% despite a jump in sales for December.
Rising costs, intense competition from Bajaj Auto dented net margin, stock price.
Now, under Rahul's son, Rajiv, Bajaj has taken its own first steps onto the global stage with organic growth of exports, mostly to South-East Asia.
Having sold 3.7 million vehicles for the fiscal year, mostly motorcycles, Hero Honda widened its lead over rival Bajaj Auto and took a 57% share of India's motorcycle market.
Singh, pharma entrepreneur K.Anji Reddy, vaccines-maker Cyrus Poonawalla, Rahul Bajaj, patriarch of the Bajaj Group, Baba Kalyani of Bharat Forge and tech tycoons Azim Premji and Shiv Nadar.
Bajaj is using the concept of foothold markets customer segments that are well-defined, easy to please, and able to introduce a product to much wider swathes of the population.
Kunal Bajaj of BDA Connect, a telecoms consultancy in Delhi, reckons that after five years India will have 60m 3G subscribers and another 29m using 3G networks through their laptops.
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And because of its low price and icon status, Tata's new model should also swipe customers from Hero Honda and other two- and three-wheel manufacturers like Bajaj Auto and TVS Motor.
Shekhar Bajaj, the head of Bajaj Electricals, the wing of the conglomerate that sells home appliances, wants to start reaching rural buyers directly and cutting out costly middlemen (such as Mr Gurubaran).
Bajaj Finance, an Indian consumer-lending firm that has been using Chatter, Salesforce.com's social-networking system, for over a year, says it has led to much smoother communication between its sales staff and underwriters.
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Under the former boss, Rahul Bajaj, the company was typical of a stratum of Indian entrepreneurs, known as the Bombay club, who wanted to keep foreign competition at bay with tariff walls and domestic mergers.
Prashant Bajaj, an Indian tourist who was spending his honeymoon with his wife Risha in Cape Town, told the BBC's Mohammed Allie that it was the availability of the latest technology that attracted them to use Escape to the Cape.
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