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1. At a Glance
Hero MotoCorp sells motorcycles and scooters. It sold 16.77 lakh of them in the three months to June 2026. That is 23% more than the 13.67 lakh sold a year earlier. Consolidated revenue reached ₹13,126 crore, against ₹9,728 crore in the same quarter. That is a rise of 35%, twelve percentage points faster than volumes grew. Management attributes the gap to price realisation and product mix.
Operating profit was ₹1,702 crore, an operating margin of 13%. Operating margin is what sales leave after the costs of making and selling, before interest and tax. Consolidated profit after tax was ₹1,418 crore, against ₹1,706 crore a year earlier. The company states that the earlier figure included a one-time gain of ₹722 crore. That gain arose, it says, on dilution of its share of investment in associates, after a public issue and a private placement. An associate is a company part-owned without being controlled.
Scooter dispatches more than doubled, to 1,93,058 units. Dispatches are units sent out to dealers. VIDA, the electric arm, grew dispatches by 151%. Global business dispatches rose 63%, and the Harley-Davidson business grew 105%.
The quarter also brought the first flex-fuel Splendor+ and HF Deluxe, engines built to run on petrol blended with ethanol. The board approved a Section 8 company for social spending, with an initial ₹1 crore subscription. A Section 8 company is the not-for-profit form under Indian company law. The parts business, the least photogenic line in any motorcycle maker’s presentation, grew 30% to ₹1,689 crore.
For the full year to March 2026, revenue was ₹47,411 crore. Operating cash flow over that year was ₹8,315 crore.
2. Introduction
Hero MotoCorp began in 1984 as Hero Honda, a technology collaboration between the Munjal family’s Hero group and Honda of Japan. Before that, Hero sold bicycles under the Hero Cycles brand, so the founding technology was the pedal. Manufacturing of motorcycles began in 1985.
In 2011 Honda sold its 26% stake to the Munjals and the joint venture ended. The company was renamed Hero MotoCorp, an exercise in dropping one syllable and keeping the entire customer base. It has been the world’s largest maker of two-wheelers for more than two decades. That ranking counts units sold in a calendar year by a single company. The title is defended annually, largely from small towns, one Splendor at a time.
The recent past has been busier than the steady-commuter image advertises. In the year to March 2026 the company put ₹720 crore into Euler Motors, taking that holding to associate status. In April 2026 it bought further compulsorily convertible preference shares in Euler for ₹210 crore. Such shares must later convert into ordinary ones, and the holding reached 36.67% fully diluted. Fully diluted counts every share that would exist once those instruments convert.
In July 2026 the board approved an investment of up to ₹1,000 crore in Ather Energy. Ather approved 76.19 million warrants to Hero for ₹959.99 crore, a warrant being the right to buy a share later. The stake could rise to 30.68%.
July also brought entry into Germany with the KSR Group and the Euro 5+ XPulse 200 range. That made Germany the 53rd market abroad. VIDA launched outside India for the first time, in Nepal, with CG Motors. The company announced investment of over ₹3,200 crore in Andhra Pradesh. That includes a ₹750 crore global parts centre at Tirupati, with 4,000 jobs. July dispatches rose 19% to 5.33 lakh units.
The annual general meeting was held on 5 August 2026. It approved dividends totalling ₹185 per share for the year. Sachin Agrawal took charge as chief technology officer on 21 May 2026. Vikram Kasbekar stepped down from that role and remains an executive director. Srihari Mulgund was appointed chief strategy officer with effect from 17 August 2026.
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3. Business Model: WTF Do They Even Do?
Hero makes two-wheelers in quantities that make the word scale feel undertrained for the job. Capacity in the year to March 2026 stood at 86.3 lakh units across eight plants. Six of them are in India. The others are at Villa Rica in Colombia and Jessore in Bangladesh, with a global parts centre at Neemrana in Rajasthan. The company is organised around the proposition that many people want to get somewhere for very little money.
The range splits along familiar lines. The 100cc core is Splendor and HF Deluxe country. Domestic dispatches there ran at 12.17 lakh units in the quarter, against 10.91 lakh. Market share in that band was 85.8%. The deluxe 125cc line covers Glamour X, Xtreme 125R and Super Splendor XTEC 2.0. Dispatches there were 1.60 lakh units, against 1.10 lakh.
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