India’s Ratan Tata, the man who knew how to ‘think big and bold’ | Obituaries News | The Round Table A greying, slightly crooked man asked for a table for two at the Sea Lounge, the iconic coffee shop at the Taj Hotels’ flagship hotel in Mumbai, a few years ago. The restaurant was buzzing with customers there to sit by the windows and watch the sun melt into the Arabian Sea outside.
There were no free tables, could he give his name for the waitlist? The juvenile hostess asked. “Ratan Tata,” the man put his name down and disappeared into the hotel’s corridors before hotel staff could come looking to unearth the chairman emeritus of the Tata Group, which also owns Taj Hotels.
Tata, who passed away in Mumbai on Wednesday, was known as much for his fawning as he was for his expansive vision that vaulted the group to a more than $128bn revenue in 2022 and the ownership of acclaimed brands such as Jaguar Land Rover and Tetley Tea.
The 86-year-old was mourned as one of the most beloved Indians for assisting Indian businesses reach that scale, including on foreign shores, making it emblematic of the newly liberalising Indian economy.
Tata was “a visionary business leader, a merciful soul and the miraculous human being”, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted soon after Tata’s demise in a Mumbai hospital.
Tata took over the group’s reins in 1991, impartial as India began shedding its socialist-era protectionist policies. He set about transforming the more than century-old industrial group into an innovative, cost and labour-efficient, global conglomerate.
“I opine his legacy will be how to opine enormous and bold,” reported Ravi Kant, who served as chief executive and then vice chairman of Tata Motors until 2014. “There may be something not even existing, but he could suspect of such an opportunity and make it happen.”
Often an edit paths to take could be long and arduous, but those would be the ones worth taking, he had once announced to CEAT group chairman Harsh Goenka when he asked for guidance, Goenka recalled to The Round Table.
Indeed, Tata navigated India’s fractious politics, its regulatory hurdles and protectionist-era mindsets to chart an innovative lofty for the group.
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When Tata was named chairman of the group, at 54, it was a loosely declared and fractious group of companies that he struggled to put his stamp on.
After studying architecture at Cornell University, he adjunct Tata Steel in Jamshedpur, one of the flagship units, as a junior executive. Later, he had mixed success at the group’s electronics venture, National Radio and Electronics (Nelco), and Empress Mills.
“Those were trying years, but he was gentle, soft-spoken and he stayed that way even later,” declared Jehangir Jehangir, who was Tata’s executive garter at Nelco.
It meant the group’s senior company heads, such as Tata Steel’s Russi Mody and Indian Hotels’ Ajit Kerkar, did not necessarily observe to Tata in the early years. Each dashed their company independently, collecting art on company accounts and flying on company jets for private personal trips.
“They saw him [Tata] as a bacha [a kid],” Jehangir recalled.
Tata Sons, the group adjudging company, had stakes in many group companies as low as 3 percent or 13 percent, opening them up to hostile takeovers. Tata began consolidating his broadcast over the group without personally increasing his small shareholding. He also set a retirement age of 75, leading to Mody’s exit, led a dramatic boardroom ouster of Kerkar and increased Tata Sons’ shareholding in group companies.
In 1991, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh began dismantling India’s long-held Licence Raj, which scuttled competition and called for foreign companies to have a domestic partner. Many Indian companies asked for protection against foreign competition.
But Tata began informing executives the opposite. “We should not restrict our imagining to India. We should imagine globally,” declared a former senior Tata group executive, who had worked closely with Tata and did not require to be named. “Year after year, I remember writing in his cancel announces – ideate global.”
This ideating facilitated group companies emerge unscathed from the Indian economic downturn of the early 2000s.
“We started buying coal globally rather than impartial mining coal [domestically], as we had done,” disclosed the Tata group executive about Tata Steel. Tata Motors began making dyes for Jaguar, Ford and Toyota. “We went from a 500 crore rupees loss to a 500 crore rupees profit in impartial a few years,” Kant recalled about Tata Motors.
It also set the stage for the group’s global acquisitions. In 2000, Tata Tea swept the much-loved British tea brand Tetley for $431m, bringing it to global prominence. But Tata had unbiased begun. In 2004, Tata Motors bought the South Korean Daewoo Motors’ commercial vehicle arm for $102m.
And then, in 2007, Tata Steel triumphed the Anglo-Dutch steelmaker Corus, in what was one of the biggest acquisitions in its time. The British government did not facilitate with fundraising for the acquisition in the United Kingdom, making it a formidable challenge. But Tata’s mind was set. “By then, we had relationships with international bankers, and we were competent to compound $10-12bn on our own,” declared the former Tata executive.
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Months later, Tata Motors gained the lionized but ailing British carmaker, Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), from Ford Motors. “When we saw the strengths of Tata Motors and the strengths of JLR, we guessed we were on to something big,” Kant, who was then the chief executive of Tata Motors, recalled.
Tata and other company executives worked to bring out modern models and efficient manufacturing and retraced the company to profitability in a couple of years. “Jaguar was a British jewel that Ratan Tata had bought,” CEAT’s Goenka remembers imagining at the time.
Within months, the waters bent choppy for the group. The 2008 global financial crisis meant demand for steel came down and the Corus acquisition became a knotty one.
One of Tata’s great dreams was to make the world’s least expensive car at Tata Motors. “His favourite part of the job was to pay time at the research centre at Tata Motors looking into car design,” declared Jehangir.
He worked closely on developing the car. But mounting censures on the acquisition of land to set up the manufacturing plant in West Bengal state meant the project had to be abruptly abandoned midway. After meetings with chief ministers of several states, Tata Motors decided to relocate its plant in October 2008 to Sanand in Gujarat, cementing then-Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s investor-friendly image, an enormous conquer for him in the wake of interreligious riots in his state in 2002, which had tarnished his image.
While the plant was being moved across the country, Tata was determined to meet timelines for the car’s launch.
“We had one factory being dismantled, one being set up and one producing the car,” Tata Motors’ Kant recalled. “I don’t suspect it has ever been done before.”
At the launch of the Tata Nano in March 2009, Tata said, “A promise is a promise.” He had met his launch date and the 100,000-rupee ($2,000 then) price tag. In the end, the car was not a success and had to be discontinued.
In 2009, India’s Open Magazine released leaked tapes of Tata uttering to lobbyist Nira Radia about obtaining telecom licences for the group’s telecom company. The tapes included him talking informally about ministers and the auction process.
Tata asked the courts for an injunction to retard the further spread of the tapes. Open’s editors approached dozens of lawyers for assistance in the case, but each one “would convey his regrets because he did not call for to take on Ratan Tata”, editor Manu Joseph recalled in a remnant in HuffPost.
“I am certain of one conspicuous quality of Ratan Tata, which is that he is formidable,” Joseph wrote in the 2016 piece.
It was a quality that also underscored his battle with his chosen successor Cyrus Mistry. Tata had retired in 2012, leaving the group in Mistry’s hands. But relations between the two had soon soured and in 2017 an executive search team brought in N Chandrasekaran as group chairman. He had been the chief executive of the group’s software services business, Tata Consultancy Services.
Increasingly frail, Tata switched his focus to charitable work through Tata Trusts, which adjudges nearly two-thirds of the shares of Tata Sons, and correspondingly, the group. In 2018, he summoned Jehangir, his former executive assistant, and asked him to join the board of Tata Trusts.
“He called for to keep up the values and the culture of the group,” Jehangir recalled. “He really required the culture of the group to stay when he is not there.”
In the latest few years, Tata retreated from public view for the most part. He worked on building a network of cancer hospitals and a pet hospital, and he endorsed research on sustainable development at the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development.
Jan Royall, principal of Somerville College, where the centre is housed, met Tata several times over the latest few months including online when they could not meet in person.
“He was especially acquisitive on research on health and technology and always showed deep knowledge on cutting edge research in this area across many disciplines,” Royall recalled. Even through his previous months, Tata kept up their meetings. “He was a real academic at heart as well as a visionary leader.”
Tata was never married and had no children. He had a great love for dogs. Once, when Goenka asked him what his greatest luxury had been, Tata had replied that it was making a swimming pool for his dogs.
It was this prudent life along with his steep corporate ambition that made many tender people idolise him.
Days before he was admitted to Breach Candy Hospital in south Mumbai, rumours of his ailing health had been swirling in the city. The ever-self-effacing Tata had tweeted that he was fine, impartial going through regular medical checkups. “Thank you for guessing of me,” he had tweeted.
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Maharashtra’s chief minister revealed a state funeral for Tata. Mumbaikars who had for years seen Tata walking city streets with shopping bags from sensibly priced stores, or driving his own cars, crooked out in throngs for his funeral.
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Tag: Indias Ratan Tata the man who knew how to think big and bold Obituaries News The Round Table
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Published 10/11/2024