Tata Sons Ltd. is searching for a successor to Chairman Ratan Tata, whose acquisitions of Jaguar Land Rover and Tetley Group Plc charted India’s emergence as a global economic power.
The 72-year-old Ratan, who built the group into India’s biggest with revenue of more than $70 billion, will retire at the end of 2012 after two decades running the Mumbai-based company. A five-member committee will vet candidates for the role, Tata Sons said in an e-mailed statement yesterday.
The successful candidate will control a group whose 96 companies make cars from the $72,500 Jaguar XJ to the $2,500 Nano, produce steel and grow tea served at the Tata-owned Boston Ritz-Carlton. Tata accounts for almost 7 percent of India’s gross domestic product.
“They should be looking for an international profile, which doesn’t mean necessarily a foreigner,” said Andrea Goldstein, senior economist at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris. Ratan Tata studied overseas “then years later, this outlook shows how the company has changed.”
Ratan, a Cornell University-trained architect, took the reins in 1991 and steered its expansion through at least 35 overseas acquisitions, including steelmaker Corus Group Plc and Jaguar Land Rover, according to Bloomberg data. The group gets 65 percent of its revenue from outside India.
Opening Economy
Ratan took charge when India’s current Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, as finance minister, started opening up the economy. Ratan increased group revenue 12-fold during his tenure, mirroring India’s expansion to Asia’s third-largest economy and a member of the Group of 20 top nations.
“Tata kept the business group together, and internationalized it,” said Vikas Sehgal, a Chicago-based partner at Booz & Co. The successor would need the “same depth and breadth that Ratan Tata brought to the table, the kind of bandwidth as a manager to deal with an eclectic mix of companies.”
Indian newspapers including the Economic Times have speculated that Noel N. Tata, Ratan’s half brother and son-in- law of Shapoorji Pallonji Mistry, the largest individual shareholder of Tata Sons, may be groomed to lead the group.
Noel will join Tata International Ltd., the overseas unit, as managing director after stepping down from the same position at Trent Ltd., the group’s retail arm, on Aug. 12, Trent said in a statement to the Bombay Stock Exchange on July 29. Noel spent 11 years at Mumbai-based Trent. He wasn’t available when called at his office.
