Chetan Maini Quits As Mahindra Reva CEO

Chetan Maini, who founded Reva more than two decades ago, has resigned as CEO of the electric car company now owned by Mahindra & Mahindra. He will be replaced by Arvind Mathew, a former managing director of Ford in India. 

Maini, 44, has been hailed as India's Elon Musk, chief product architect at Tesla Motors. 

"I may take up a position within the Mahindra Group or may even look outside. To be honest, I have still not decided," Maini told ET. "I will continue to be a shareholder, while Arvind will look after the day-to-day operations at the company. I ran the company for 20 years. I will figure out what I want to do next," he said. 

Mathew will take over on May 1. Mahindra & Mahindra had last month moved Mahesh Babu, its VP product development of MRV and one of the key architects of XUV, as the COO of Mahindra Reva. 

While Maini is stepping down from his position of CEO, he will continue to hold his stake position in the company. However, Chetan Maini's own stake position has been consistently coming down since M&M took over. Maini had a stake of over 5.5% at the time of takeover, at the end of FY14, his stake position came down to 3.57% in the company. 

The stake owned by Sudarshan Kumar Maini and AEV LLC too have come down in Mahindra Reva. While Sudarshan Kumar Maini's stake has come down from 18.43% at the end of FY11 to 11.94% in FY14, AEV's stake has eroded to 6.84% in FY14 from 11.15% at the end of FY11.