RATAN TATA
Ratan Tata, in full Ratan Naval Tata, (born December 28, 1937, Bombay [now Mumbai], India), Indian businessman who became chairman (1991–2012 and 2016–17) of the Tata Group, a Mumbai-based conglomerate.
A member of a prominent family of Indian industrialists and philanthropists (see Tata family), he was educated at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, where he earned a B.S. (1962) in architecture before returning to work in India. He gained experience in a number of Tata Group businesses and was named director in charge (1971) of one of them, the National Radio and Electronics Co. He became chairman of Tata Industries a decade later and in 1991 succeeded his uncle, J.R.D. Tata, as chairman of the Tata Group.
Upon assuming leadership of the conglomerate, Tata aggressively sought to expand it, and increasingly he focused on globalizing its businesses. In 2000 the group acquired London-based Tetley Tea for $431.3 million, and in 2004 it purchased the truck-manufacturing operations of South Korea’s Daewoo Motors for $102 million. In 2007 Tata Steel completed the biggest corporate takeover by an Indian company when it acquired the giant Anglo-Dutch steel manufacturer Corus Group for $11.3 billion.
The quietude is what sets him apart. You would expect a person such as Mr Tata, tall of stature and blessed with the typically striking looks of his Persian forbears, to stand out in a crowd. Not so the helmsman of the Tata group, whose solitary nature, humility and intense effort to shun the arch lights can make him seem almost invisible in any gathering. The rectitude and resolve behind this persona is of more consequence, though, defining as they have the shape and substance of a remarkable business conglomerate during what has been the most transformative period in its long and storied history.
Every chairman of Tata Sons — the holding company that is the fastener keeping the many disparate elements of the whole together — has left an indelible imprint on the group.
Jamsetji Tata, the founder, with his ideals and his vision laid the seeds for the flowering of the conglomerate. Dorab Tata secured his father’s legacy by realising that vision. Nowroji Saklatvala consolidated what had been created and JRD Tata, the last of the great patriarchs of Indian industry, moulded the group in his own image: benevolent, urbane and all-encompassing.
It is likely an understatement to say that Ratan Tata, who took over as chairman in March 1991, was stepping into big shoes. And he was stepping into a minefield. Less than a decade from the new millennium, the Tata group was a bloated, unevenly managed and excessively bureaucratic behemoth operating in an India that had only begun jettisoning the jargon of socialism and the shibboleths of policy-making that had promised plenty but delivered little. Worse, Mr Tata was seen by many as an interloper, with none of the charisma or the capability of the legend who had preceded him, an accidental chieftain who had ascended to the top mainly by virtue of his surname and lineage.
TATA COMPANY ; RATAN TATA