Ratan Tata, patriarch of biggest Indian conglomerate, dies at 86

His death was announced in a statement by Tata Group Chairman Natarajan Chandrasekaran, who called Tata “a truly uncommon leader whose immeasurable contributions have shaped not only the Tata Group but also the very fabric of our nation.”

As chairman for more than two decades beginning in 1991, Tata rapidly expanded the 156-year-old business house. It now has operations in more than 100 countries and clocked $165 billion in revenue for the year ended March 2024.  

Through more than two dozen listed firms, the conglomerate makes products ranging from coffee and cars to salt and software, runs airlines and introduced India’s first superapp. It has also partnered with Taiwan’s Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. for a $11 billion chip fabrication plant in India and is said to be planning an iPhone assembly plant.

Under Tata’s stewardship, the conglomerate embarked on an expansion drive that turned the tables on India’s colonial past. It snapped up iconic British assets including steelmaker Corus Group Plc. in 2007 and luxury carmaker Jaguar Land Rover in 2008. But the financial crisis roiled global markets soon after, damping car sales in developed economies.

“Ratan Tata imagined big and took the empire beyond India,” said Kavil Ramachandran, executive director of the Thomas Schmidheiny Center for Family Enterprise at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad. “While he thought globally, these turned out to be hasty initiatives.”

Tata helmed the group for 21 years in his first stint and retired in 2012. He returned as interim chief for a few months in 2016 following the acrimonious ouster of his successor, Cyrus Mistry.

Tata also found himself at the center of intense battles for control of the conglomerate not once but twice in his career. 

The first battle, when he took over as chairman in 1991, pitted him against long-time executives who had been running fiefdoms within the conglomerate under his predecessor. The second, in 2016—four years after his retirement—was about preserving his legacy as Mistry sought to reduce debt. 

Tata won both. In 2016, Mistry was ousted as the chairman of Tata Sons, the group’s main holding firm, in a boardroom coup. The move triggered a bitter courtroom battle that threatened to end a 70-year partnership with Mistry’s family and stamped Tata’s authority on the conglomerate. In 2020, Mistry’s family signaled its intent to sell an 18% stake in Tata Sons.

Terrorist Attack

The conglomerate faced another crisis in late 2008 when terrorists targeted the group’s flagship hotel, the Taj Mahal Palace, overlooking Mumbai’s Gateway of India, part of a broader attack on the city. About 31 people, including 11 employees, died during the four-day siege. Guests staying at the hotel today are greeted by a memorial with the names of the victims, each of whose families Tata personally visited.

Tata never married and had no children. His death leaves a vacuum at the helm of the powerful Tata Trusts, a collective of charities. These philanthropic trusts own about 66% of Tata Sons, which in turn controls all the major listed Tata firms. Tata Trusts have traditionally been led by a member of the Tata family and wields control over the conglomerate through its holding in Tata Sons. 

In his last few years, Tata became a passionate backer of startups including Ola Electric Mobility Ltd., which had a bumper listing in 2024, and Goodfellows, a platform aimed at intergenerational friendships.

The origins of the Tata group date back to 1868, when Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata set up a trading company that later diversified into cotton mills, steel plants and hotels. The Tatas belong to the Parsi Zoroastrian community, which fled religious persecution in Persia centuries ago before finding refuge in western India.

Parents Divorced

Born in Mumbai on Dec. 28, 1937, Ratan Naval Tata was brought up by his grandmother after his parents, Naval and Sooni Tata, divorced when he was 10. His father had been adopted into the main Tata family at 13 by the daughter-in-law of Jamsetji Tata, founder of the Tata Group.

Usually chauffeured around in a Rolls-Royce, Tata attended school in India’s business capital, Mumbai. As a young student, he learned the piano and played cricket but was afraid of public speaking. His younger brother, Jimmy Tata, stayed out of public life, and little is known about him.

“We faced a fair bit of ragging and personal discomfort because of our parent’s divorce, which in those days wasn’t as common as it is today,” Ratan Tata wrote in a Facebook post in 2020. “But our grandmother taught us to retain dignity at all costs, a value that’s stayed with me until today. It involved walking away from these situations, which otherwise we would have fought back against.”

Tata went to college in the US at Cornell University with plans to study mechanical engineering, as his father wished, but he found his calling elsewhere.

“I had always wanted to be an architect, and at the end of my second year at Cornell, I switched—much to my father’s consternation and upset,” Tata recalled in a 2009 interview with Cornell. He graduated in 1962 with a degree in architecture.

IBM Offer

Tata wanted to settle down in California, but the poor health of his grandmother prompted him to return to India, where he had a job offer from International Business Machines Corp.

The then-chairman of Tata Sons, Jehangir Ratanji Dadabhoy Tata, popularly known as JRD, persuaded him to instead work for the group. The two men were distantly related, parts of different branches of the Tata family tree. Groomed by JRD, the younger Tata started his career at the conglomerate in 1962, undertaking several stints at various units before joining management in the 1970s.

In 1991, when Tata was handpicked for the top job at Tata Sons, the group was mostly focused on India. Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., the software maker that would become a cash cow years later, was still in its infancy. The automotive business hadn’t yet started making passenger cars.

The 1990s was also the decade when India started cutting its notorious red tape, discarding parts of a failed Soviet-style planned economy. That meant private sector companies could compete more effectively in sectors that were dominated by government enterprises, paving the way for faster economic growth and unleashing consumption.

As India allowed foreign automakers from Ford Motor Co. to [hotlink]Hyundai Motor[/hotlink] Co. to set up factories and tap burgeoning consumer demand, Tata decided to make cars as well. Tata called the first locally built passenger vehicle—rolled out in 1998 and named Indica—“my baby.”

As India’s economy started to boom in the 2000s, Tata became more adventurous. In 2007, he took on debt to pay about $13 billion for Corus, the British steelmaker. The following year, he acquired Jaguar Land Rover, or JLR, from Ford for $2.3 billion. He also bought Tetley Group Plc and the heavy-vehicles unit of South Korea’s Daewoo group.

New Challenges

While the acquisition spree helped bring the conglomerate’s geographical footprint to an entirely new level, it also set up a number of challenges.

The 2008 financial crisis triggered a broad slide in commodity prices, while a steel glut fueled by an increase in Chinese exports depressed prices, sparking criticism that Tata had overpaid to acquire Corus. Tata Steel Ltd. has pared its European operations in recent years in the face of slumping demand and high cost structures, and slashed thousands of jobs in the continent.

JLR also hit a rough patch soon after it was acquired by Tata as the financial crisis pummeled demand for luxury cars as well as the company’s ability to access credit. While the Tata Group managed to turn around the marquee car brand within a couple of years, it soon faced other headwinds, from slumping Chinese demand to Brexit. The pandemic and chips shortage affected JLR in recent years. 

Tata oversaw another auto-related setback with the failure of the Nano microcar. He wanted to build a cheap automobile that would retail for 100,000 rupees ($1,190.9), targeted at the millions of Indians who typically used motorcycles to get around and transport their families. Production of the Nano was ended in 2018, about 10 years after its unveiling, amid a lack of demand due to early quality and safety concerns. 

Perhaps the final business battle Tata fought was his most gratifying. 

In 2021, Tata Sons regained control of Air India Ltd., the nation’s flagship carrier, almost 90 years after it was taken over by the state. Heavily indebted and a shadow of its former glory—Salvador Dali once designed ashtrays as gifts for the airline’s guests— the deal meant Tata was able to welcome home to the group an airline originally founded by his mentor, JRD. 

Welcome back, Air India 🛬🏠 pic.twitter.com/euIREDIzkV

— Ratan N. Tata (@RNTata2000) October 8, 2021