Indian magnate Ratan Tata dies – how he made a UK mark

Ratan Tata, Chairman of Tata Sons, during the annual Clinton Global Initiative

(Image credit: Brian Harkin/Getty Images)

published 25 October 2024

A few years ago, an elderly man turned up at Taj Hotels’ flagship hotel in Mumbai and asked for a table for two in its buzzing cafe overlooking the Arabian Sea. There were no free tables, so the young hostess asked him to put his name on the waiting list. “Ratan Tata” he wrote, and disappeared before anyone made the connection. They had just turned down the chairman emeritus of Tata Group – the family-controlled conglomerate that had built, and still owns, the hotel. Ever self-effacing, he didn’t take it personally.

The story is typical of Tata, known for his personal humility as much as his lofty corporate ambition, whose death at 86 on 9 October plunged India into mourning, says Al Jazeera. Mumbaikars “turned out in throngs” for the state funeral of a man renowned for walking the streets “with shopping bags from sensibly priced stores” or driving one of his pet projects, the Tata Nano: a tiny car priced under £2,000, which, to his disappointment, didn’t take off. Having taken the helm of the more-than-century-old group in 1991, just as India was shedding its socialist-era protectionist policies, he transformed it into an international conglomerate, worth some $365 billion today, becoming “emblematic of the newly liberalising Indian economy”.

Yet Tata, who lived alone in a modest book-filled seafront house near Mumbai, and readily confessed his “best friends” were “his dogs”, was held in warm affection too, says The Telegraph. He once beat several sportsmen and Bollywood stars to be voted Indian of the Year in a TV show. Even India’s August Economic Times interspersed its tributes to him with details of his favourite dishes.

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Born in 1937, in what was then British India, Tata came from a large illustrious Parsee family, says The Telegraph. His father was the adoptive son of Jamsetji Tata, whose own father had founded the business in 1868, “making his first fortune by selling opium to the Chinese”. Over the decades, the family added textile and steel mills, a shipping line, a carmaker, a tea company and a bank to the portfolio – as well as Bombay’s luxury Taj Mahal hotel, famously built by Jamsetji after being turned away by European hotels. Ratan went on to study architecture and structural engineering at Cornell University and was offered a job by IBM. He returned to India in 1962 – and began a lengthy apprenticeship across Tata companies (fitting in a Harvard MBA along the way) before being picked by his elderly cousin, J.R.D. Tata, to succeed him as chairman.

How Ratan Tata created a stir in Britain

Tata deployed his skills to streamline and modernise the group, says Bloomberg. But as India’s economy boomed, he “became more adventurous”. In 2000, he caused a stir in Britain by acquiring Tetley Tea for £271 million. It was the start of a $20 billion, decade-long acquisition spree. It was in the UK that Tata really made his mark. In 2007, he borrowed heavily to acquire Corus, home of the old British Steel, for £6.2 billion; a year later he paid £1 billion for Jaguar Land Rover (JLR). He lost a fortune on the former as it underwent nearly two decades of losses and painful restructuring, but transformed JLR into the country’s biggest carmaker. The UK has every reason “to be grateful” for an investor with his patience, says The Guardian: two heavy industries “would almost certainly have shrunk even further” without him.

Ratan’s last decade was marred by an unseemly corporate power struggle with his chosen successor, Cyrus Mistry. But his final business battle was perhaps his most “gratifying”, says Bloomberg. In 2021, Tata regained control of the flagship carrier Air India “almost 90 years after it was taken over by the state”. Among his many philanthropic legacies, notes The Telegraph, is a $20 million animal hospital in Mumbai and a specially constructed “kennel” for stray dogs at Tata’s global HQ in the city – almost certainly a corporate first.

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.