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Thursday, December 4, 2008

What’s Wrong with Tata’s Global Footprint Strategy

Tata aggressive stance of acquiring companies globally and developing global presence has gone wrong. Tatas are now painfully recognizing the fact that they in for more trouble for their overleveraged acquisitions of giant steel and niche automotive player. Tata’s Jaguar & LandRover (JLR) unit has already asked for the £1 Bn of loan from the government, there were also news of Tatas picking up money from the market at higher interest rates to keep its JLR unit afloat. Tata Corus is already on cost cutting spree and has asked Dutch government for its staff realization program.

So, what went wrong with Tata’s strategy of developing Global presence and become a world player in almost every spree of its business?

Tata’s core strategy was evading regional and nation business cycles, to implement this strategy Tatas needed to generate revenue from world over and setup manufacturing units to ratonalise the cost. Tatas made assumption that if business cycle in a country/region goes through trough then its companies can survive on demand and revenue from other regions. Tata never thought what would happen if different regions go into recession simultaneously. The thought of global recession never concurred to Tatas as “decoupling theory” was very popular at that point of time.

The other major mistake that Tatas did was it has been unable to accrue production cost benefit from its takeover. It invested in highly niche automotive companies like JLR, which can’t be produced world over thus production cost are difficult to rationalise. The other acquisition, Corus, runs on thin margin and high costs; Corus hasn’t been able to cut costs yet, though it may be able to do it successfully in future but it is taking toll of Tatas.

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