Ratan Naval Tata ( born 28 December 1937) is the present chairman of Tata Sons and therefore, Tata Group.He is also the chairman of major Tata companies such as Tata Steel, Tata Motors, Tata Power, Tata Consultancy Services, Tata Tea, Tata Chemicals, The Indian Hotels Company and Tata Teleservices.
When he returned to India in 1962 after turning down a job
with IBM on the advice of JRD, he was sent to Jamshedpur to work on the shop
floor at Tata Steel with other blue-collar employees, shoveling limestone and handling
the blast furnace. In 1971, he was appointed the Director of National Radio and
Electronics (Nelco), which was in dire straits when he came on board: with
losses of 40% and barely 2% share of the consumer electronics market. However,
just when he turned it around (from 2% to 25% market share), the Emergency was
declared. A weak economy and labour issues compounded the problem and Nelco was
quickly near collapse again.
For his next assignment, in 1977 he was asked to turn around
the sick Empress Mills, which he did. However, he was refused a Rs 50 lakh
investment required to make the textile unit competitive. Empress Mills
floundered and was finally closed in 1986.
In 1981, JRD Tata stepped down as Tata Industries chairman,
naming Ratan as his successor. He was heavily criticized for lacking experience
in running a company of the scale of Tata Industries.
In 1991, he was appointed group chairman of the Tata group.
As group chairman, he has been responsible for converting "the corporate
commonwealth" of different Tata-affiliated companies into a cohesive
company. He has been responsible for the acquisition of Tetley, Jaguar Land
Rover and Corus, which have turned Tata from a largely India-centric company
into a global business, with 65% revenues coming from abroad. He also pushed
the development of Indica and the Nano. He is widely credited for the success
of the Tata Group of companies, especially after the liberalization of controls
after the 1990s.
In August 2007, Ratan Tata lead Tata Group's acquisition of
British steel maker Corus. At that time, this was the largest takeover of a
foreign company by an Indian company, and resulted in Tata Group becoming the
fifth largest steel producer in the world. According to the BBC, however, some
analysts criticized the move, saying that Tata Group had overpaid for Corus and
had prioritized national pride before its shareholders.
Tata is set to retire in December 2012 to be succeeded by
Cyrus Mistry, the 42-year-old son of Pallonji Mistry and managing director of
Shapoorji Pallonji Group.
Honors, awards and international recognition
Ratan Tata serves in senior capacities in various
organisations in India and he is a member of the Prime Minister's Council on
Trade and Industry. Tata is on the board of governors of the East-West Center,
the advisory board of RAND's Center for Asia Pacific Policy and serves on the
program board of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's India AIDS
initiative.
Ratan Tata's foreign affiliations include membership of the
international advisory boards of the Mitsubishi Corporation, the American
International Group, JP Morgan Chase and Booz Allen Hamilton. He is also a
member of the board of trustees of the RAND Corporation, University of Southern
California and Cornell University.[7][8] He also serves as a board member on
the Republic of South Africa's International Investment Council and is a member
of the Asia-Pacific advisory committee for the New York Stock Exchange. In
2010, he joined BMB Group as an advisory board member.
Year Name Awarding organization Ref.
2010 Business
Leader of the Year The Asian
Awards.
2010 Honorary Doctor
of Laws Pepperdine
University.
2010 Legend in
Leadership Award Yale University.
2010 Businessman
of the Decade Federation of Indo-Israel
Chambers of Commerce.
2008 Honorary
Doctor of Science Indian Institute
of Technology Kharagpur.
2008 Honorary
Doctor of Law University of
Cambridge.
2007 Honorary
Fellow London School of Economics.
2007 Honorary
Citizen of Singapore Singapore
government.
2007 Carnegie
Medal of Philanthropy Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace.
2005 Honorary
Doctor of Science University of
Warwick.
2004 Honorary
Degree of Doctor of Technology Asian
Institute of Technology.
2004 Honorary
Economic Advisor Hangzhou, China.
2001 Honorary
Doctor of Business Administration Ohio
State University.
FIRST Award for Responsible Capitalism.
26th Robert S. Hatfield Fellow in Economic Education, awarded
by Cornell University
recipient of the NASSCOM Global Leadership Awards (2008)
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