In India, Ratan Tata is being mourned as a towering business leader who took the sprawling family-controlled Tata Group into international markets while retaining its founding spirit of capitalism laced with philanthropy. But the UK has its own reasons to be grateful to the chair of the group from 1991 to 2012. Two heavy industries in the UK – steel and car-making – would almost certainly have shrunk even further without his style of long-termism.
Tata’s 2007 purchase of Corus, the merged British Steel and Dutch firm Koninklijke Hoogovens, was a terrible deal – appallingly timed and overpriced. Having agreed a takeover at 455p a share, the Indian group ended up paying 608p, or £6.2bn, after a Brazilian competitor emerged as a rival bidder. Steel prices promptly collapsed with the global financial crisis and the recession that followed. Steelmakers were losing money across Europe. Since Tata was assumed to be mostly interested in Corus’s more modern Dutch assets, the writing looked to be on the wall for the UK end.
And, indeed, that was the likely fate in March 2016 when the entire Tata Steel UK operation was put up for sale under Ratan Tata’s successor, Cyrus Mistry, with losses running at £1m a day. By October of that year, however, Ratan Tata, who still headed the Tata Trusts that controlled the group, fired Mistry. The disputes between the two men were wider, but the immediate threat over the Port Talbot steelworks in Wales lifted. By November, Tata was recommitting to steel in the UK.
There were still tactical retreats. Engineering steel was sold to Liberty Steel, whereas the long-products division in Scunthorpe had already gone to Greybull Capital. But Port Talbot ploughed on, even if the last blast furnace closed in September as part of the latest reinvention plan to build a cleaner electric furnace on the site.
The new strategy wouldn’t be happening without £500m of UK state support, it should be said. Critics have long argued Tata is expert at extracting taxpayer subsidies. Equally, though, Tata is estimated to have lost £5bn in steel in the UK over the years without taking a dividend, and is still here. And the latest plan still involves £750m of Tata’s money – capital that could be deployed elsewhere. It is hard to think of many owners that would tolerate the same level of financial pain and kept going.
At some level, the decision seems to have flowed from the group’s roots as a company that talks about the importance of “community”. At the start of the 20th century, the company’s founder, Jamsetji Tata, recruited the Fabian grandees Sidney and Beatrice Webb to plan the social services in India’s “steel city”, Jamshedpur, in the north-east of the country.
In car-making, the key deal was the 2008 purchase of Jaguar Land Rover from Ford for $2.3bn (£1.75bn). JLR has been an easier ride, but not one without bumps. After initial post-takeover success, JLR overreached by trying to compete on volumes with the likes of BMW, a strategy that had to be reversed.
The point is that – as with steel – Tata Group has tended to show patience with its troublesome UK operations. JLR was slow to move into electric vehicles but is now committed to spend £500m to upgrade the Halewood plant in Merseyside to build hybrid cars and prepare for electric versions of its medium-sized SUVs, the Discovery Sport and the Range Rover Evoque. A gigafactory in Somerset will come with (yet more) state support to make batteries for those electric cars. Back in 2008, the rival bidders negotiating with Ford were all private equity-backed. JLR, one can surely say, is better off for being owned by Tata.
Not all the credit goes to Ratan Tata himself, of course. Much of the investment came after his exit from day-to-day management. But he most definitely shaped the group’s obsession with investing in the UK, starting with the purchase of Tetley Tea in 2000, and his looming presence made it hard for his successors to take a backwards step in the face of financial results that have been mixed, at best.
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JLR’s performance is now improving strongly, and the company remains an important player in the West Midlands economy. And Port Talbot at least has a nailed-down plan for the next few years, even if that is scant comfort for the people losing their 2,500 jobs. The story could easily have been worse.