Tata Pulls Ford Units Into Its Orbit , page 1

Tata Pulls Ford Units Into Its Orbit

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LONDON — When Ratan Tata visited the home of the designer Ralph Lauren last autumn, the two auto enthusiasts spent much of the time in the garage, admiring Mr. Lauren’s car collection, including the Batmobile-esque 1955 Jaguar XKD.

Now Mr. Tata is poised to take over Jaguar.

Tata Motors said Thursday that it was beginning detailed talks with the Ford Motor Company about buying the Jaguar and Land Rover brands, confirming what investors and analysts in India, Detroit and Britain have anticipated for months. Tata said it intended to reach an agreement over the next few weeks.

In 1991, Ratan Tata took over the Tata Group, a titan in India. He might retire after the $2,500 People’s Car begins sales

Going overseas was necessary, Mr. Tata said. In the late 1990s, the group’s truck unit recorded a loss that was the “biggest in Indian history,” he said in a recent interview in Tata’s headquarters in the leafy, historical Colaba district of Mumbai. “We were so dependent on one economy,” he said. “I decided we needed a broader view.”

Since then, Tata has done dozens of deals, buying businesses as diverse as the Tyco Global Network; Daewoo Commercial Vehicles; the Moroccan chemical company Imacid; Tetley Teas; and, most audaciously, the $11.3 billion takeover of the British steel maker Corus last year, a company several times the size of Tata Steel. The group’s 27 listed companies have a market cap of over $70 billion, and the group reported after-tax profit of $2.8 billion in the last fiscal year — a 33 percent increase from the year before, in part because of the Corus acquisition.

The latter deal garnered Mr. Tata some rare criticism, with analysts wondering if he had taken on too much. Corus “came to us, we didn’t seek them out,” Mr. Tata said, and it was a deal he could not pass up. In “one swoop we were in Europe, where we weren’t before,” he said. “That opportunity was going to happen once, and it was not going to happen again.”

The Tata Group is an unusual corporate enterprise. Started in 1868 by Jamsetji Tata, one of India’s dwindling group of Parsis, the group has often seemed to value employees as much as profits (paying laid-off Tata Steel employees for the rest of their lives when the company made cuts, for example)

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