On October 9, India lost one of its tallest industry titans. Ratan Tata, the Chairman Emeritus of Tata Group, breathed his last on Wednesday night at Mumbai's Breach Candy Hospital. Tata not only scripted history in terms of many firsts but also had one of the greatest comeback stories in the corporate world.
The epic Tata versus Ford saga has made it to the annals of corporate history. In the June of 2008, Ratan Tata made one of the biggest acquisitions in the automobile sector by acquiring Ford's luxury car brand Jaguar Land Rover. Not only is this one of the biggest automobile acquisitions, it is also a story of a millionaire's sweet revenge that could be a great movie script.
In the late 1990s, Tata Motors known as Telco or Tata Engineering and Locomotive Co was finding it hard to make it big with its newly launched car Tata Indica. Making it big with Tata Indica was a personal dream of Ratan Tata as it could make Tata Motors a big player in India's automobile sector. The route to make it big was far from an easy one for Tata as the Indica opened to poor reception as the country's car industry was going through challenging times.
The group's car business wasn't doing well and Tata was new in the car business. Due to this, he decided to sell the passenger car segment of TaMo, and Ford was interested to buy this segment. In 1999, Tata along with his team travelled to Detroit for a meeting with Ford executives to discuss the sale of Tata Motors' passenger car vertical.
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