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Ratan Tata Case

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Ratan Tata:
Tata Group Chairman (1991-2012)
Ratan Naval Tata has stepped down as chairman of Tata Sons and while the entire team at the $100 billion Tata conglomerate will surely feel his absence, the average Indian too will have reason to miss him. The country probably never needed Tata more than it does today; as The Economist wrote recently, ‘by standing out against graft so publicly and consistently, Mr. Tata was ahead of his time’. Not that the business suffered because of it; the diversified conglomerate that he has headed for more than two decades now has grown 20% annually since FY92 and at an even more impressive 30% in the last six years to March, 2012, a feat that not too many other business groups have been able to match. With a …show more content…

As must have been the debilitating losses in the telecom piece — an effort to explore new areas in a liberalized economic regime — or the ambitious $12-billion acquisition of the Anglo-Dutch steelmaker Corus which has left Tata Steel hugely leveraged, an attempt at making the group global. No doubt the Tatas has the financial muscle to foray into new spaces but there was also the appetite for risk; some of the global buys may not have been well-timed, a fact that Tata has graciously conceded. But there’s no doubt many of the buys – the hotels for example – hold out promise. The spectacular turnaround at the lossmaking Jaguar and Land Rover bought for $2.3 billion in March 2008 – critics carped that the Tatas would never be able to sell luxury brands in unfamiliar markets – n less than three years was proof of the group’s technological and marketing skills. But it’s a fact that TCS accounts for a tenth of the group’s turnover, a higher third of the profits and half of the market capitalization. However, skeptics who believed the Tatas would never do well in the consumer space have been stumped by the success of a Titan or even a Westside. The biggest asset that Tata will leave for Cyrus Mistry, of course, is a capable cadre of CEOs. But without its

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