Watch the Titan
The Telegraph — January 1, 2005

If Tata Group chairman Ratan Tata was flying high in 2004, 2005 may well see him touch the sky Ratan Tata loves to fly, but he confesses that he becomes bored of flying jets because of the monotony it involves.

A couple of years ago, he learnt to fly a helicopter. Why? Because a chopper flies low and slow and demands a great deal of concentration and precision while landing and taking off. The 68-year-old chairman of the Tata group loves that. Those are the traits he relies on when he flies his copter on a quick sortie to Mandwa, the hamlet on the outskirts of Mumbai that serves as a weekend getaway for the rich and the famous. It also characterises the way he runs the sprawl of 80 companies within the Rs 60,000 crore Tata group with a passion for precision and the ability to sweat the small stuff with attention to the minutest detail.

But even if he loves to fly a copter, Tata is looking to travel at supersonic speeds across the seven seas in all seven areas of business that his group straddles. His biggest dream has been to ‘internationalise’ the group’s operations, a trend that began in 2000 when Tata Tea paid $435 million for Britain’s Tetley Tea, a company almost three times its size. If that seemed audacious, 2004 catapulted the Tatas on to a whole new plane (see box). This, even while the real buzz was the public issue by Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), the software titan, raising a never-before sum of Rs 5,420 crore by a private Indian company. Not for nothing were the Tatas anointed the largest Indian business group in terms of shareholder wealth in 2004.

So what does 2005 promise for the group that Ratan Tata got to head 13 years ago when JRD Tata picked him as his heir? In a letter to the 2,60,000 employees within the group that he sends out every December 30, Tata, who joined the group in 1962 after completing an architecture degree from Cornell University, warns: “Looking ahead — 2005 and beyond — we must recognise that in the coming years we will face some major challenges. There will be intense competition domestically and from global companies. Margins will be under increased pressure. Markets will not tolerate inferior quality or poor customer support. Customer loyalty will only be achieved through product excellence and good customer relations. We must, therefore, build on our gains and not allow any sense of complacency to develop.”

Tata has always had a fetish about quality. A man who professes to use Sony products, he doesn’t mind waiting a year for the Japanese company to come out with a bestseller product, though he admires the Teutonic attention to detail that typifies German companies. Friends like sound guru Amar Bose — “He has had a profound impact on my thinking,” says Tata — have further ingrained in him the value of quality.

Tata, who prefers to be driven in an old black E Class Mercedes from upscale Colaba to the Tata group’s headquarters at Bombay House, is clearly on a high as his group looks to scale newer horizons, some closer home in Bangladesh where three of his companies are considering a combined investment of $2 billion. Last October, Ratan Tata met with Bangladesh leaders to suss out business opportunities in that country.

In a recent interview with London’s Sunday Times, Tata said he was mulling a flotation of Tata Sons, the holding company of the group. A few months ago, Tata flagged off the listing of Tata Motors on the New York Stock Exchange, which, say analysts, could be the precursor to either an acquisition or an alignment with a foreign automobile company some day.

Tata has also been looking for more and more young executives who can “rock the boat with many new ideas”. “People are afraid of that,” he once remarked. The focus within the group is on a robust human resource management that will give young executives the challenges that they so want. “We need a lot more young people (25 to 40 years) as CEOs,” says Tata. But ask him to crystal ball gaze, his vision goes well beyond 2005. “One hundred years from now,” Ratan Tata says, “I expect Tatas to be much bigger, of course, than it is now.” Who can doubt that.