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Tata led a “salt to software” conglomerate of more than 100 companies
Ratan Tata, who has died aged 86, was one of India's most internationally recognized business leaders.
The legendary tycoon led the Tata Group – commonly known as a “salt to software” conglomerate of more than 100 companies, employing some 660,000 people – for more than two decades. Its annual revenues exceed $100 billion (£76.5 billion).
Founded by Jamsetji Tata, a pioneer of Indian business, the 155-year-old Tata Group straddles a business empire spanning from Jaguar Land Rover and Tata Steel to aviation and salt pans.
The company's philosophy “tethers capitalism to philanthropy, doing business in a way that improves the lives of others,” according to Peter Casey, author of The Story of Tata, an authorized book about the group.
Tata Sons, the group's holding company, owns “a number of companies which include private companies and publicly traded companies, but they are essentially all owned by a philanthropic trust”, he explains.
Ratan Tata was born in 1937 into a traditional Parsi family, a highly educated and prosperous community whose ancestry can be traced back to Zoroastrian refugees in India. His parents separated in the 1940s.
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JRD Tata (center) asked Ratan Tata (left) to join the company after the latter returned to India from the United States
Tata attended college in the United States, where he earned a degree in architecture from Cornell University. During his seven-year stay, he learned to drive cars and fly. He has had some harrowing experiences: once losing an engine while flying a helicopter in college and twice losing his plane's single engine. “So I had to slip in,” he told an interviewer. Later, he would often fly his company's business jet.
He returned to India in 1962 when his grandmother, Lady Navajbai, fell ill and called him. It was then that JRD Tata – a relative from another branch of the family – asked him to join the Tata group. “He (JRD Tata) was my biggest mentor…he was like a father and a brother to me – and that hasn't been talked about enough,” Tata told an interviewer.
Ratan Tata was sent to a company's steel plant in Jamshedpur, eastern India, where he spent a few years in the factory before becoming the manager's technical assistant. In the early 1970s, he took over two companies from the group in difficulty, one manufacturing radios and televisions and the other textiles. He managed to overthrow the former and had mixed results with the textile company.
In 1991, JRD Tata, who had led the group for over half a century, appointed Ratan Tata to succeed him among the company's senior candidates in the role. “If one went through the publications of the time, the criticism was personal. JRD was bludgeoned by nepotism and I was called a bad choice,” Ratan Tata later said.
Peter Casey writes that under Ratan Tata's leadership, a “large, but rather heavy-handed, Indian manufacturer began to emerge as a global brand with a strong emphasis on consumer goods.”
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Ratan Tata at the inauguration of the Nano car in 2008
But the journey has been mixed.
During his tenure, the group made numerous bold acquisitions, including the purchase of Anglo-Dutch steelmaker Corus and British car brands Jaguar and Land Rover. Some of these decisions paid off, while others – including the failure of a telecommunications company – cost the company a lot of money.
A high point came in 2000, when Tata bought Tetley and became the second largest tea company in the world. This is the largest acquisition of an international brand by an Indian company.
A few years later, a guest journalist from a British newspaper asked Tata if he liked the irony of seeing an Indian company buying a major British brand. “Tata is too clever and too shy to be caught rejoicing in his successes like an East India Company nabob,” the journalist later wrote.
Tata's foray into building a safe and affordable car has proven to be disappointing. It was launched to great fanfare in 2009 as a compact model, with the base model costing just 100,000 rupees ($1,222; £982). But after the success and initial euphoria, the brand began to lose ground to other manufacturers due to production and marketing problems.
Tata later said it was a “huge mistake to call the Nano the cheapest car in the world. People don't want to be seen driving the cheapest car in the world!”
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Ratan Tata was a licensed pilot who often flew his corporate jet.
Its resilience was also tested during the Mumbai terrorist attacks of November 26, 2008. The Taj Mahal Palace, Tata's marquee, was one of two luxury hotels that were attacked, along with a railway station, a hospital, a Jewish cultural center and a few other targets. in Bombay.
Thirty-three of the 166 people who died during the 60-hour siege were at the Taj. This included 11 hotel employees, a third of the hotel's total victims. Tata pledged to care for the families of killed or injured employees and paid the relatives of those killed the salaries they would have earned for the rest of their lives. He also spent more than $1 billion restoring the damaged hotel in 21 months.
Towards the end of his career, Tata found himself embroiled in an unsavory controversy. In October 2016, he returned to Tata Sons as interim chairman for a few months after the ouster of the previous outgoing chairman, Cyrus Mistry, sparking a bitter leadership feud (Mistry died in a car accident in September 2022) . The role ultimately went to Natarajan Chandrasekaran, former managing director of Tata Consultancy Services, India's most valuable company with a market capitalization of $67 billion.
Peter Casey described Tata as a “modest, reserved and even shy man”. He found in him a “majestic calm” and “fierce discipline,” which included preparing a handwritten to-do list each day. He also described himself as a “bit of an optimist”.
Tata was also a modest and thoughtful businessman. After police were called to end a strike that had paralyzed operations at one of his company's factories in Pune in 1989, Tata told reporters: “Perhaps we have taken our workers for granted . We assumed we were doing everything we could for them. , even though we probably weren't.
In 2009, Tata spoke at an alumni reunion of his school about his dream for his country, “where every Indian has an equal chance to shine through their merit.”
“In a country like ours,” he said, “you have to try to lead by example, without flaunting your wealth and notoriety.”
