It's not that Ratan Tata finds the rich uninteresting--after all he's one of them. No, it's more the case that he finds the opportunities to be richer at the bottom end of the consumer universe. "Everyone is catering to the top of the pyramid," says the 69-year-old at his office in Bombay House, the Tata group's elegant Edwardian headquarters in India's business capital. "The challenge we've given to all our companies is to address a different market. Pare your margins. Create new markets."
The Tata group's global clout means that its chairman's thoughts get concrete results. Tata comprises 96 companies, including the world's second largest tea business (Tata Tea), Asia's largest software firm (Tata Consultancy Services), a steel giant (Tata Steel), a hotel chain (Indian Hotels) and a sprawling vehicle-manufacturing arm (Tata Motors) that includes a bicycle factory in Zambia and a project to make a car selling for $2,200. Since Tata became chairman in 1991, he has multiplied the Tata group revenues seven times to an annual $21.13 billion. Since 2000, the group's market value has multiplied almost 18 times to $49.1 billion. For the past six years, Tata has been on a $1.9 billion shopping spree that has netted Britain's Tetley Tea, South Korea's Daewoo Commercial Vehicles, Singapore's NatSteel and New York City's Pierre Hotel, among more than a dozen other acquisitions.
And it's not over yet. Anglo-Dutch steelmaker Corus agreed last month to an $8 billion takeover bid by Tata Steel. The deal is the largest-ever Indian acquisition of a foreign firm, and it will catapult Tata from the world's 56th largest steel producer to the fifth. "All credit goes to Ratan Tata," says Sanjay Bhandarkar, managing director of the N.M. Rothschild private bank in India. "He clearly has a vision and knows what he's doing."
India's industrial heritage cannot be separated from the Tata name. The company's founder, J.N. Tata, was a nationalist driven by the idea of a strong, self-reliant India. He gave the country its first steel mill, first hydroelectric plant, first textile mill, first shipping line, first cement factory and even its first world-class hotel. His successors--among them J.R.D. Tata, India's first pilot--created the first airline, first motor company, first bank and first chemical plant. And much like H.J. Heinz in the U.S., J.N. Tata attached social welfare to his business. Tata Steel introduced a series of worker benefits that would become common only much later in the West: the eight-hour day in 1912, maternity benefits in 1928 and profit sharing in 1934.
The family's reward for this progressive capitalism was to have its airline and insurance arm nationalized by the post-independence government in 1947. For decades the Tatas lay low while the "license Raj" slowly made India globally uncompetitive.