‘Unassuming’ Indian tycoon dies at 86

Ratan Tata, who has died at the age of 86, was one of India’s most internationally recognized business leaders.

For more than 20 years, the tycoon led the Tata Group, known as the “salt to software” conglomerate, comprising more than 100 companies and employing about 660,000 people. Annual revenue is over $100bn (£76.5bn).

Founded by Indian business pioneer Jamsetji Tata, the 155-year-old Tata Group spans a wide-ranging business empire, from Jaguar Land Rover and Tata Steel to aviation and salt pans.

Peter Casey, author of the official book about the group, The Tata Story, said the company’s ethos “yokes capitalism to philanthropy by doing business in a way that improves the lives of others.” That’s what it means.

The group’s holding company, Tata Sons, has “a number of companies, including private and public companies, all essentially owned by charitable trusts,” he explains.

Ratan Tata was born in 1937 into a traditional Parsi family. The Parsis are a highly educated and wealthy community that traces its ancestry to the Zoroastrian refugees of India. His parents divorced in the 1940s.

Tata attended university in the United States and received a degree in architecture from Cornell University. During his seven-year stay, he learned to drive a car and fly a plane. He had some harrowing experiences. I once lost an engine while flying a helicopter when I was in college, and I’ve also lost an engine on one of my airplanes twice. “So I had to slide in,” he told an interviewer. He then began frequently flying the company’s business jets.

He returned to India in 1962 when his grandmother Mrs. Navajibhai fell ill and sent for him. It was then that JRD Tata, a relative from another branch, asked him to join the Tata Group. “He (JRD Tata) was my biggest mentor…He was like a father and a brother to me. That’s not talked about enough,” Tata told an interviewer. .

Ratan Tata was sent to the company’s steel factory in Jamshedpur, eastern India, where he spent several years on the factory floor before becoming a technical assistant to the manager. In the early 1970s, he took over two group companies that were in trouble. One company manufactured radios and televisions, and the other manufactured textiles. Although he managed to make a comeback, he had mixed results at the textile company.

In 1991, JRD Tata, who had led the group for more than half a century, appointed Ratan Tata as his successor over a senior internal candidate. “If you find publications from that time, the criticism was personal. JRD was entangled in nepotism and I was branded as the wrong choice,” Ratan Tata later said.

Peter Casey writes that under Ratan Tata’s leadership, “a great but somewhat cheap Indian manufacturer began to emerge as a global brand focused on consumer goods.”

But the journey was complicated.

During his tenure, the group made a number of bold acquisitions, including the acquisition of Anglo-Dutch steelmaker Corus and UK-based car brands Jaguar and Land Rover. Some of these decisions were successful, while others, such as a failed communications venture, cost the company dearly.

The high point was in 2000, when Tata acquired Tetley and became the world’s second largest tea company. The deal is the largest acquisition of an international brand by an Indian company.

A few years later, a visiting reporter from a UK-based newspaper asked Tata whether he liked the irony of an Indian company acquiring a prestigious British brand. “Mr. Tata is too shrewd and too shy to be thought to be gloating about his successes like the nabob of the territorially usurped East India Company,” the journalist later wrote.

Tata’s efforts to make safe and affordable cars have been disappointing. The model was launched to much fanfare in 2009 and was a compact model priced at just 100,000 rupees ($1,222, £982) for the base model. However, after the initial success and euphoria, the brand began to lose out to other manufacturers due to production and marketing issues.

Tata later said, “Branding the Nano as the world’s cheapest car was a big mistake. People don’t want to be seen driving the world’s cheapest car!”

His resilience was also tested in the November 26, 2008 Mumbai terror attacks. Tata’s Taj Mahal Palace was one of two luxury hotels attacked, along with a railway station, a hospital, a Jewish cultural center and several other targets. In Mumbai.

Of the 166 people who died during the 60-hour siege, 33 were in the Taj. The victims included 11 hotel employees, one-third of the hotel’s total casualties. Tata has pledged to look after the families of its deceased or injured employees and has promised to pay the families of the deceased employees the salaries they would have earned for the rest of their lives. It also spent more than $1 billion to repair damaged hotels within 21 months.

Toward the end of his career, Tata found himself embroiled in an unpleasant controversy. In October 2016, he returned to Tata Sons as interim chairman for several months after former incumbent Cyrus Mistry was sacked and a bitter management feud ensued. death). The role ultimately went to Natarajan Chandrasekaran, the former chief executive of Tata Consultancy Services, India’s most valuable company with a market capitalization of $67 billion.

Peter Casey described Tata as “a modest, reserved, even shy man”. He described himself as having a “regal calm” and a “stern discipline” that included creating a daily handwritten to-do list. He also described himself as “a bit of an optimist.”

Tata was also a humble and prudent businessman. After police were called in to end a strike that disrupted operations at one of his factories in Pune in 1989, Tata told reporters: “Perhaps we are not taking our employees for granted.” “I thought I was doing everything I could for them.” , when perhaps we weren’t. ”

In 2009, Tata spoke at a school reunion about his dream for a homeland where “all Indians have equal opportunity to shine based on merit.”

“In a country like ours, we should strive to lead by example rather than flaunting our wealth and fame,” he said.