Ratan Tata, the former Tata Group chairman who put a staid and huge Indian corporation on the world scene with a run of high-profile acquisitions, died at the age of 86, the Tata Group announced in a statement late on Wednesday.
According to two people with intimate knowledge of Tata's physical condition, who served as chairman of the conglomerate for more than 20 years, he has been receiving urgent care in a Mumbai hospital earlier on Wednesday.
He returned to India in 1962, having completed his architecture studies at Cornell University, and started working for the organization his great-grandfather had started almost a century earlier.
He was employed by multiple Tata enterprises, such as Telco, which is now part of Tata Motors, and Tata Steel. He later made a name for himself at National Radio & Electronics Company, a group company, by eliminating losses and growing market share.
Following the resignation of his uncle JRD Tata in 1991, he became leadership of the company. This change in leadership occurred concurrently with India's radical economic reforms, which opened up the country's economy to the world and ushered in an era of rapid expansion.
One of Ratan Tata's initial actions was to increase control over enterprises, enforce retirement ages, elevate younger individuals to top positions, and limit the authority of some of the CEOs of the Tata Group's businesses.
He took the corporation's cash cow, the IT firm Tata Consultancy Services, public in 2004 after founding the telecommunications company Tata Teleservices in 1996. But in order for the business to grow properly, the organization decided it needed to go outside of India.
In a 2013 interview with the Stanford Graduate School of Business, he stated that it "was the quest for growth and changing the ground rules to say that we could grow by acquisitions which earlier we had never done."
The corporation made the largest buyout of a foreign company by an Indian company at the time when it acquired the British tea manufacturer Tetley for $432 million in 2000 and the Anglo-Dutch steelmaker Corus for $13 billion in 2007.
Tata Motors then acquired British luxury auto brands Jaguar and Land Rover from Ford Motor Co in 2008 for $2.3bn. His pet projects at Tata Motors included the Indica — the first car model designed and built in India — as well as the Nano, touted as the world’s cheapest car. He contributed initial sketches for both models.
Following his departure from the Tata Group, Ratan Tata rose to prominence as an investor in Indian startups, supporting a wide range of businesses such as the digital payments company Paytm, the ride-hailing company Ola's Ola Electric division, and the home and beauty services provider Urban Company.
Among his several honors, in 2008 he was granted India's second-highest civilian award, the Padma Vibhushan, for his outstanding and distinguished contribution in commerce and industry.
The GSB Hub published this content on 16 Oct,2024.