Imagine Tata Consultancy Services being bested in market value by not just any other Tata company, but by one that wasn’t even part of the group until a few years ago—and was also a complete shambles.

Even with artificial intelligence taking a wrecking ball to information-technology services, such an outcome seems fanciful.

For another famed industrial house, something similar isn’t quite as unthinkable, though. At roughly Rs 1.2 lakh crore ($13.5 billion), CG Power and Industrial Solutions, a maker of transformers and industrial motors, isn’t far behind Murugappa Group’s flagship, non-bank lender Cholamandalam Investment and Finance Company, which is valued at Rs 1.3 lakh crore.

In fact, towards the end of 2024, CG Power consistently traded higher than Cholamandalam. This September, they were worth roughly the same. Sure, Cholamandalam’s market cap isn’t quite as high to breach as that of TCS, but when Murugappa-owned auto-parts maker Tube Investments of India bought CG Power in 2020, it was worth all of Rs 1,700 crore. The debt-laden company’s reputation was in tatters, it having been accused of defraudingLivemintCBI files charge sheet against CG Power, former promoter in ₹2,435 cr bank fraud case banks a year earlier.

CG Power’s outsize contribution to the group’s market value—over a quarter—is despite it being a relative minnow on other metrics. Its profits are less than a fourth of Cholamandalam’s and less than half of fertiliser maker Coromandel International.

Its turnaround has been widely chronicledMcKinsey.comTurning things around: An interview with Natarajan Srinivasan, but what’s little discussed is how quickly this has changed the pecking order of the nine listed companies within the 125-year-old conglomerate. And along with it, investors’ perception of the group.

Much of that is influenced by Vellayan Subbiah, a great-grandson of its founder credited not just with the resurgenceFortune IndiaThe Thalaiva At Murugappa Group of Cholamanadalam and Tube Investments, but also with dragging the stodgy, old-economy group, perhaps kicking and screaming, into electric vehicles and semiconductors.

“Murugappa has always been a sensible capital allocator and has a track record of making money,” said the co-founder of a portfolio-management-service (PMS) firm.