During a recent board meeting in Istanbul for TürkTraktör, CNH Industrial NV's Turkish joint venture, Chief Executive Gerrit Marx found himself discussing the virtues of scale with the company's directors. The venture sells two out of every five tractors in Turkey and was working through a domestic market that Marx put at roughly 26,000 units for the entire year. The mood in the room was sombre, Marx recalled, until he offered a reality check from South Asia.
"I said, look, I think in India, you sell 26,000 units on a single day during Diwali. The whole year in Turkey is one day on the Diwali festival in India." Marx reflected on having said it in a lighter vein.
The chief executive was surely alluding to industry trends. Turkey has been a key CNH manufacturing and export base for over two decades through the joint venture. In 2025, it produced 25,833 tractors (about 60% of Turkey's output), exported 11,023 (about 72% of the country's tractor exports) and sold about 16,000 at home, accounting for a 38.45% share. The home market is Europe's largest and the world's fifth-largest, but it is cyclical: sales stood at 40,498 units in 2025, down 36% year-on-year from the 2023 peak of 77,901. This suggests a fall of about 5.9% a year from 2016, but an increase of about 7.8% a year from the 2019 low, according to industry estimates.
In comparison, India's tractor market grew by about 29% over five years, from 8.99 lakh to 11.60 lakh units in FY26. That represents a 5.2% CAGR in domestic wholesale dispatches. Moreover, demand is not spread evenly across the calendar. The October-November window coincides with the end of the monsoon and cash realisation from the Kharif harvest. Farmers suddenly have liquid capital in hand. Buying agricultural machinery on auspicious festival dates, chiefly Dhanteras and Diwali, is considered a harbinger of prosperity. Farmers routinely book tractors weeks or months in advance, explicitly requesting physical delivery and registration on the exact festival day. This compresses massive demand into a single day or a few days of deliveries.
Data from the Federation of Automobile Dealers Associations (FADA) and the Tractor and Mechanization Association (TMA) highlight the scale behind Marx's comparison. Retail tractor sales during the standard 42-day festive period typically range between 85,000 and 87,000 units. Of these, on peak auspicious days (specifically the 48-hour Dhanteras-to-Diwali period), nationwide dealer handovers surge into clustered bursts, with 15,000 to over 25,000 tractors delivered in a 24- to 48-hour window.
The comparison reflects India's central position in the global tractor business. Worldwide tractor production totals roughly two million units a year, spanning everything from sub-compact utility tractors to 700-horsepower articulated machines used on American cash-crop farms. India alone consumes about one million of these, roughly half of all tractors sold worldwide. With 160 to 170 million hectares under cultivation, about a tenth of the planet's arable land, it is a market that Western farm equipment makers can no longer treat as peripheral.
Breaking Ground in Uttar Pradesh
To capture that demand, CNH officially broke ground on November 12 (Thursday) on a 100-acre greenfield manufacturing facility in the Yamuna Expressway Industrial Development Authority (YEIDA) corridor near Jewar airport. The plant will have an eventual nameplate capacity of 100,000 tractors a year, supplementing the company's existing Greater Noida facility, which has reached its operational ceiling.
"The existing plant, at 70,000 units, is saturated," said Narinder Mittal, President of CNH India Region. The new plant will follow a modular buildout, coming online in mid-2028 with an initial capacity of 20,000 units a year and scaling up in 20,000-unit increments to reach 100,000 by 2030 or 2031, depending on Total Industry Volume (TIV). Taken together, this will lift CNH's Indian capacity from about 70,000 units today to around 170,000, more than doubling it.
Funding for the expansion draws on a multi-year investment roadmap first outlined by CNH India management in February at roughly Rs 1,800 crore, split between Rs 1,500 crore for agriculture and Rs 300 crore for construction equipment. The plan was subsequently expanded in August to Rs 2,000 crore through 2030, with executives emphasising that roughly half of that envelope extends beyond brick-and-mortar factory investments into R&D and product development.
Addressing whether the greenfield site requires entirely fresh outlays, Mittal clarified that Phase 1 will absorb a significant portion of the previously guided capital envelope, combining factory construction with ground-up product engineering. Beyond tooling for the initial 20,000-unit assembly lines, the capital programme will finance higher-horsepower tractor platforms scheduled to debut domestically in the first quarter, as well as export-grade mechanical upgrades such as continuously variable transmissions (CVT) and dual-range high-low gearboxes. Subsequent phases to scale the plant towards its 100,000-unit ceiling will trigger additional tranches of capital, paced to match cyclical domestic demand and export orders.
"This investment reflects our confidence in India's manufacturing capabilities, engineering talent, and long-term growth potential," Marx said in a press statement.
This new cycle of spending follows a decade of significant capital deployment. Over the last 10 years, CNH has invested close to Rs 2,500 crore in its Indian operations. This includes Rs 600 crore spent in the last three years alone to develop new engine platforms that meet stringent modern emission standards. Approximately 71% of the company's revenue comes from the agriculture sector, followed by 26% from construction equipment and 3% from financial services in India. CNH aims to leverage India's robust supply chain to export components such as axles and gearboxes to its 40 plants worldwide. The company plans to grow its component exports from the current $200 million to upwards of $500 million within the next three to four years, Autocar Professional reported in February.
A 30-Year Trough vs Indian Decoupling
CNH's capital commitment comes as the global farm equipment industry works through its worst cyclical slump in decades. "Right now, as an agricultural machinery industry worldwide, we are at a trough," Marx noted. "We believe we are at a 30-year trough when it comes to equipment volume, not equipment value, but equipment volume."
While North American and European machinery sales buckle under depressed crop realisation prices and high interest rates, India's domestic farm equipment market remains buoyant. CNH executives concede an unseasonal 15% to 18% contraction across September and October, yet project domestic retail volumes will finish the calendar year up 3% to 4%.
For context, India's tractor industry despatched a record 11.6 lakh units to dealers in fiscal 2026 (retail sales were 10.5 lakh), up 23.5% year-on-year, driven by favourable monsoons, state-led election subsidies, a cut in goods and services tax (GST) on tractors from 12% to 5% in September 2025, and pre-buying ahead of proposed TREM V emission standards. Within this record volume, CNH Industrial commanded roughly a 4.5% to 5% market share, buoyed by expanding demand in higher-horsepower categories and rapid double-digit growth. However, market leader Mahindra & Mahindra has since cut its domestic industry volume outlook for fiscal 2027 from 5% growth to flat, citing an uneven monsoon, depleted reservoir levels, elevated input costs and rainfall deficits across major farming hubs such as Maharashtra and Karnataka. Escorts Kubota has taken a similarly defensive posture, revising its FY27 outlook to flat at best and warning of near-term demand headwinds following FY26's elevated statistical base.
Marx views the global agricultural machinery market as consolidating into three primary economic blocs: a US-led network, a China-dominated trading axis and an emerging, autonomous India-led sphere. For compact and utility tractors under 50 horsepower, India has become the world's main production base. While a 50-horsepower tractor functions as a primary workhorse across Africa, the Middle East and India, the same machine serves as a secondary maintenance runabout on 300,000-hectare agribusiness estates in Brazil or cash-crop operations in the American Midwest.
Corporate Evolution to Pure-Play Agriculture
CNH Industrial's transformation into the world's second-largest farm equipment maker, and, once its construction equipment divestment closes, a pure-play agriculture company, is the product of a two-stage unwinding of the Agnelli family's old industrial conglomerate.
The structural evolution traces back to the 1999 merger of Case and New Holland within the Fiat Group. For years, agricultural machinery sat alongside passenger cars, heavy commercial haulers and diesel powertrains under a single corporate umbrella. That conglomerate began dismantling in 2011, when Fiat separated its passenger-car operations from its capital goods divisions, creating Fiat Industrial. Two years later, in 2013, Fiat Industrial merged with CNH Global to form CNH Industrial NV. Today, passenger-car maker Stellantis retains no commercial or operational ties to CNH; the sole common denominator remains Exor, the Agnelli family investment vehicle, which, as of June 30, 2026, held a 26.9% equity stake (45.6% voting rights) in CNH and 15.5% (23.9% voting rights) in Stellantis.
The break-up continued in early 2022, when CNH's truck, bus and engine operations were demerged as Iveco Group. Most of Iveco has since been divided again: defence systems went to Leonardo, while trucks, buses and engines went to Tata Motors, whose takeover tender reached 96.25% of Iveco's common shares on November 9, 2026. Marx, who had steered Iveco as chief executive through that post-demerger era, returned to lead CNH in 2024, immediately elevating India to a direct-reporting global region. Despite the corporate separation, critical supply chain links remain: CNH continues to assemble FPT's 2.8-litre F28 engine under licence at its Greater Noida facility to power New Holland and Case utility lines. With Tata's takeover now complete, CNH's F28 engine supplier becomes Tata-owned.
The definitive step towards a pure-play model came with the announced divestment of CNH's construction equipment business into a joint venture majority-owned by Japan's Kobelco Construction Machinery. Under the terms of the transaction, valued at an enterprise value of $1 billion, Kobelco takes a 70% controlling stake, yielding $700 million in cash proceeds for CNH, as adjusted at closing. Closing is expected by the end of 2027, subject to regulatory approvals. CNH will retain a 30% minority interest with a three-year lock-up period, and CNH Capital will remain with CNH. CNH's Indian construction unit will also migrate into the joint venture post-close.
By shedding heavy earthmoving machinery, CNH redeploys its $700 million towards debt reduction, dealer distribution upgrades and precision agriculture platforms. With legacy Fiat industrial assets now partitioned between Tata (trucks, buses and engines), Leonardo (defence systems) and Kobelco (construction), CNH emerges as an agriculture-only specialist, anchored by its Case IH, New Holland, STEYR and Raven precision-tech brands under its "Path to 2030" roadmap.
Market Share Ambitions and Regional Nuances
To justify its capacity push, CNH has set an internal mandate to double its Indian market share by 2030 from 2024 levels, betting on an uneven domestic landscape that Marx characterises as "many Indias", where the manufacturer's penetration swings from 1% to 5% in low-volume states to upwards of 10% to 15% in established farming pockets.
CNH is around No. 8 in India, with roughly 5% share, behind M&M, Swaraj, Sonalika, TAFE, Escorts Kubota, John Deere and Eicher. Reaching 10% by 2030 would lift it into the top five, past Escorts Kubota, John Deere and Eicher.
Exports currently account for roughly 20% of CNH's Indian output, a ratio management expects to hold steady even as absolute factory volumes double, driven by parallel domestic expansion and incremental shipments of compact tractors. After launching compact exports with roughly 1,000 units in their initial year, CNH expects to ship 3,000 units the following year, with compacts eventually making up 20% of total overseas shipments. "Percentage-wise, it may not change much because of the volume," Mittal said. "Now, given that India has global responsibility, from that context, I think the only way it should be north. It should be going up," Mittal added.
In the domestic market, CNH currently sells compacts under its Blue Series — New Holland's SIMBA range of sub-30hp specialty tractors launched in 2022 — but intends to roll out a proprietary, ground-up compact tractor platform by 2028 before pushing it into global export channels by 2029.
Overseas expansion still faces tariff friction, though the worst has passed. CNH paused North American tractor shipments when US import tariffs climbed into an unviable 20% to 50% band. The February trade deal between India and the US then cut the rate on Indian-built machinery from 50% to 18%, and CNH has since resumed full-scale exports. Marx noted that sustained export growth to the US now hinges on the tariff coming down further, to a commercially workable 10% to 15%.
Rejecting Batteries for Biomethane
While automotive peers pivot towards electrification, CNH has ruled out battery-electric powertrains for mainstream agricultural fieldwork. Marx cites weather risks and seasonal field constraints as insurmountable barriers for battery technology.
"The biggest risk a farmer has is the weather," Marx said. "Here is the monsoon, in South America it is El Niño... When you decide that it can be the day you do it, you cannot be on a plug in the wall or changing batteries. Farming needs reliable machines that do the job when it matters."
Instead, CNH is targeting biomethane as its primary alternative fuel. The company has deployed demonstration units of its New Holland T7-270 methane-powered tractor in India, pitching the machine to commercial dairies, sugar mills and large-scale biogas producers who generate methane directly from agricultural biomass and cow manure.
The India Bet
Marx, who visits India multiple times a year, points out that managing distributed global manufacturing centres requires accepting distinct operational risks. Elaborating on CNH's multi-hub engineering strategy, he joked about accountability across time zones: "If you consider CNH like a body, we have many brains. We have only one guy who gets fired if things go wrong. But we have multiple brains."
In Uttar Pradesh, CNH is betting that its newest corporate brain can help cushion a global downturn.