Tomotaka Ishikawa is an unlikely hero. Short, bespectacled, with neatly kept hair and clothed in a staid business suit, he doesn’t look like the man who saved Yamaha from being crushed in several South-east Asian countries by rivals, such as Honda. But look closer and listen. Ishikawa oozes a confidence that comes from success, and speaks of challenges with the zest of a man who thrives on action. “(In India) we did not offer customers what they wanted,” says Ishi-kawa, who parachuted into the top job at Yamaha Motors India last year, when the company had accumulated losses of Rs 1,000 crore. “The 125cc and 135cc bikes we had were great on performance. But taking the volume route of Bajaj Auto and Hero Honda will not help.”

That’s bold talk for any CEO and anathema for most Japanese managers. But Ishikawa has made a name for himself by being unconventional. After rescuing Yamaha from disaster in south-east Asia, he now says he wants to turn around Yamaha’s waning fortunes in India by transforming it into a niche, high-value player that eschews the low-margin, big-volume commuter segment, presently dominated by Hero Honda, Bajaj Auto and TVS Motors.

That’s the same strategy that Ishikawa used successfully when he led Yamaha’s operations in Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia. But replicating that success might not be too easy in India. “We need a theme for India,” he says.

Though Yamaha did have an early success in India with its power-packed RX-100 model in the late 1980s, the company was unable to keep up with the pace at which Bajaj, TVS and Hero Honda launched products and grabbed market share. From being an almost cult product, the RX-100 lost its die-hard patrons when it failed to catch up with the two-stroke to four-stroke transition forced by the government in the early 1990s. Yamaha tried many times to launch new products and rebuild its reputation, but it always failed. The running joke was that since Yamaha operated from Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest and politically most powerful state, the company was behaving like the quintessential politician rather than the Indian arm of the world’s second largest motorcycle company (behind Honda), and never delivering on its promises. So now, when Ishikawa says he wants to grow Yamaha India’s market share from 3 per cent to 10 per cent over the next five years and wipe out all the losses on its books, there is no reason to believe he will succeed. Except his track record.

When Ishikawa was running Yamaha’s operations in Thailand, he shook up a sleepy company and grabbed slipping market share by launching a range of new products. Part of this aggressive remaking of the Thai company comes from his American-ness. He spent many years in the US with Yamaha, and his office walls are covered with exciting and whimsical pictures and cartoons from those days. Ishikawa himself says he loves action and change, and the challenge of fixing things. But fixing Yamaha India may be more than he bargained for, as the company has far more fundamental problems than it had in South-east Asia.

For one, his strategy will require sweeping changes both in the market and the company’s Surajpur factory in Uttar Pradesh and it’s clear that it’s not an area he is comfortable with. During a visit to the factory, Ishikawa’s normally spirited countenance was sombre and he looked a bit like a fish out of water.