Peter Kronschnabl, president, BMW India, walks into Hyatt’s Polo Lounge at precisely 6pm. It’s a rainy evening in New Delhi and there are traffic snarls everywhere. But Kronschnabl, who has just driven in from the BMW sales office in Gurgaon, looks, in his dark blue suit and tie, the perfect picture of an unruffled German automaker.
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The lounge, with its mahogany walls and nicely-lit bar, is appropriately clubby. We sit at a table on the periphery. Kronschnabl wavers between a draught beer and a caipirinha, eventually picking the latter. And when it arrives—a glassful of Brazilian rum with lots of ice and lots of lime—along with a vodka tonic for me, we settle down to talking about cars. Beginning with the 1978 Volkswagen Passat Kronschnabl owned when he was a student in Pforzheim in Germany’s Black Forest.
“It was an interesting car. At that time, I was very fond of wind surfing and it had a separate space where I could put my surfboard inside the car—you didn’t have to put it on top of the car,” Kronschnabl reminiscences. His car did 100,000km in those years, mostly on skiing trips to the mountains and drives to the ocean for wind surfing.
These days, Kronschnabl drives a 7 series BMW (Rs74 lakh plus) and manoeuvres the a.m. traffic from his house in Vasant Vihar to his office in Gurgaon. It has been 12 years since this 41-year-old German joined BMW. “They give you a lot of training, a lot of support, but they also push you in the deep end and you swim,” he says of his years at BMW, many of which have been spent in markets such as Africa and the Caribbean.
I ask him if India feels like the deep. “For me, it’s a challenge and I think for everybody it’s a challenge, you need to be culturally aware,” he says, picking his words with care. But then again, Kronschnabl is no stranger to India. He was here 13 years ago, in 1994, as a graduate student working on a business school project. He and a fellow student hung out in the lobbies of five-star hotels such as the Taj, with their questionnaires. They were working on their master’s thesis—the image of European luxury cars in India. And after being recruited by BMW, Kronschnabl made many more trips before he was posted here in August last year. The company’s Chennai plant, which began operation in March, can produce 1,700 cars at full capacity during a single shift. BMW planned to sell 1,000 cars this year, but sales are going well and the company has already revised its target upwards to 1,200 cars.