He had a immense impact on India, this article/obituary hits many of the highlights.
From Bloomberg via Yahoo Finance, October 9:
Ratan Tata, the businessman who inherited one of India’s oldest conglomerates and transformed it through a string of eye-catching deals into a global empire, has died. He was 86.
His death was announced in a statement by Tata Group Chairman Natarajan Chandrasekaran, who called Tata “a truly uncommon leader whose immeasurable contributions have shaped not only the Tata Group but also the very fabric of our nation.”
As chairman for more than two decades beginning in 1991, Tata rapidly expanded the 156-year-old business house. It now has operations in more than 100 countries and clocked $165 billion in revenue for the year ended March 2024.
Through more than two dozen listed firms, the conglomerate makes products ranging from coffee and cars to salt and software, runs airlines and introduced India’s first superapp. It has also partnered with Taiwan’s Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. for a $11 billion chip fabrication plant in India and is said to be planning an iPhone assembly plant.
Under Tata’s stewardship, the conglomerate embarked on an expansion drive that turned the tables on India’s colonial past. It snapped up iconic British assets including steelmaker Corus Group Plc. in 2007 and luxury carmaker Jaguar Land Rover in 2008. But the financial crisis roiled global markets soon after, damping car sales in developed economies.
“Ratan Tata imagined big and took the empire beyond India,” said Kavil Ramachandran, executive director of the Thomas Schmidheiny Center for Family Enterprise at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad. “While he thought globally, these turned out to be hasty initiatives.”
Tata helmed the group for 21 years in his first stint and retired in 2012. He returned as interim chief for a few months in 2016 following the acrimonious ouster of his successor, Cyrus Mistry.
Tata also found himself at the center of intense battles for control of the conglomerate not once but twice in his career.
The first battle, when he took over as chairman in 1991, pitted him against long-time executives who had been running fiefdoms within the conglomerate under his predecessor. The second, in 2016 — four years after his retirement — was about preserving his legacy as Mistry sought to reduce debt.
Tata won both. In 2016, Mistry was ousted as the chairman of Tata Sons, the group’s main holding firm, in a boardroom coup. The move triggered a bitter courtroom battle that threatened to end a 70-year partnership with Mistry’s family and stamped Tata’s authority on the conglomerate. In 2020, Mistry’s family signaled its intent to sell an 18% stake in Tata Sons.....
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He also had an impact on Climateer Investing with the little car, the Nano, and talk of an electric version.
