As the head of Renault India, Francisco Hidalgo Marques faces his biggest challenge yet.
20 Jan 2026 | 206 Views | By Ketan Thakkar
When Renault Group began redrawing its global growth priorities, India moved sharply up the list. The market was no longer a “nice-to-have”; it was becoming a strategic anchor. The company needed someone who understood scale, volatility, culture, and transformation, often simultaneously.
And that’s how Francisco Hidalgo Marques, a 22-year ...
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When Renault Group began redrawing its global growth priorities, India moved sharply up the list. The market was no longer a “nice-to-have”; it was becoming a strategic anchor. The company needed someone who understood scale, volatility, culture, and transformation, often simultaneously.
And that’s how Francisco Hidalgo Marques, a 22-year Renault veteran, found himself unpacking cartons in Gurgaon, with his wife and two young daughters settling into a city they had only known through food, music, and stories. For Francisco, the move felt both familiar and entirely new. He has lived across continents, adapted to unfamiliar cultures, and rebuilt brands in countries where he barely spoke the language, yet India felt different.
“Nothing moves in a straight line here,” he says, smiling as if acknowledging a truth he is still getting used to. “You have to be ready for surprises, political, economic, emotional, everything.” And India was not waiting. The brand he inherited had gone quiet, the market had raced ahead, and competitors had rewritten the rulebook.
François Provost, Renault’s new global CEO, had seen Francisco under pressure years earlier in South Korea, “in the trenches”, solving problems which had no easy answers. It was a directive, delivered with the weight of expectation, “Go rebuild India. Make it matter again.” Francisco’s Renault career reads like the journey of someone repeatedly handed the most challenging puzzles.
In France, his early grounding in distribution and supply chain taught him how global crises ripple through factories and showrooms. Forecasting trained him to sense market tremors before others noticed. South Korea hardened him. “Hyundai and Kia were not just competitors. They were a lesson,” he recalls.
The speed, the consumer obsession, the restless demand for more, it rewired his sense of pace. Working under Provost in that environment forged a quiet trust between them that still holds. Eastern Europe demanded empathy more than expertise. He found himself navigating seven cultures, eight languages, and decades of political baggage to craft a standard brand narrative.
“It was not about cars. It was about people, cultures, old stories,” he says. “And if you do not respect that, you do not win.” Russia brought toughness, sanctions, localisation challenges, and shifting alliances. Spain brought creativity. “We wrote everything from zero,” he says of his time leading Dacia.
The brand’s rise to No. 2 in retail was not just a business story to him; it was an emotional one. “When you see a brand move because the story connects, you do not forget it.” But India, he says, is a different kind of unpredictable. “Here, even when you think you understand something, the market can flip the next week. You cannot relax. Ever.”
Rebuild, Reassure, Reimagine
The job in India is deceptively simple. Renault needs to become relevant again, not eventually, but now. The lineup has aged. The cadence slowed. Competitors overtook Renault in a blur of launches. For Francisco, the first message had to be one of commitment. “Trust is everything. People need to feel you are here to stay, really stay.” The plant acquisition was the first big signal.
The return of the Duster became the emotional anchor. “Everyone asks me, when is it coming? It shows the love India has for this car,” he says. Then he adds softly, “Love is not enough. We have to earn it again.” He knows Renault cannot afford another extended silence.
“You cannot go quiet in this market,” he says. “Once you disappear, coming back is ten times harder.” Francisco studies India the way an anthropologist studies culture, quietly, attentively, without judgement. He watches how families shop for cars, how siblings influence decisions, how WhatsApp forwards shape perceptions of dashboards and sunroofs.
What stood out was not the features themselves, but the emotional meaning behind them. “Sometimes people want features just to show,” he says. “Maybe they do not use them. But that is part of the culture. If you judge it, you lose the customer…Here, the feature is not just a feature. It is a message.” On EVs, he is clear. “I will not launch an EV just to say we have an EV,” he says.
“I want to launch when there is real demand, when we can make a profit, not chase numbers.” As for India’s unpredictability, he does not rush to define India. “Here, logic does not always explain behaviour,” he says. “And that is okay.” People who work with Francisco often say his professional steadiness comes from his personal grounding.
His Spanish parents speak to him daily, and if they forget, he calls. His wife, whom he met at Renault, has followed him across five countries. His daughters, who grew up speaking Russian, have adapted to India faster than he expected. The way they chose India is almost poetic.
The family made a game of selecting their following country; the girls voted for India for its food, its music, its brightness, long before they realised it was happening. This openness to the world helps him integrate quickly. He observes people constantly, how they talk, how they complain, how they negotiate, how they smile, and uses that understanding to decode markets.
“When you live abroad for so long, you learn something important: you are a foreigner,” he says. “You must listen first.” In that sense, India is not unfamiliar territory. It is a place where listening is a survival skill. Under his leadership, Renault’s rebuild in India is emerging around three human themes. Speed, because India is mercilessly fast. “It is not the big fish that eats the small one anymore. It is the fast fish that eats the slow one,” he says, speaking as someone who has felt speed in Korea and chaos in Russia.
Substance, because he refuses to let Renault chase features for vanity. “A car must be meaningful,” he says. “It cannot just be a set of features.” And story, because India connects through feeling. “When customers feel the story, when they say maybe you are right, I did not see it that way, half the job is done,” he says.
He knows Renault is starting from silence, a low noise baseline in a noisy market. “We were not declining,” he says. “We were hibernating. Now we are awake. But waking up is not enough; we must run.”
What makes him compelling is not the assurance of success, but the clarity with which he sees the mountain ahead. “Every market I handled had challenges. But India, India is something else. You cannot bluff your way through it. You have to earn every inch.” And he is here, sleeves rolled up, ready to do precisely that.