Tata Motors Under Cyrus Mistry's Leadership

It was back in 2012 when Ratan Tata, the then Chairman of the Tata Group, decided to step down and paved the way for Cyrus Mistry to take the reins of the company. Cyrus Mistry was part of the panel tasked to find a successor for Ratan Tata. The youngest son of the Indian construction magnate Pallonji Mistry was earlier the Managing Director of the Shapoorji Pallonji Group, which in fact is the second largest stakeholder in Tata Sons.

It was under Cyrus Mistry's guidance that the revival of Tata Motors, as a brand was underway and in 2013, the company launched 8 facelifted cars on one day. This was the change in brand image that the company was looking at and by establishing the HorizonNext, Tata Motors was looking to take things to a new level, with new cars under the leadership of Karl Slym. Cyrus Mistry was always the head of Tata Motors as being the Chairman of Tata Sons automatically makes him the Chairman of Tata Motors but his involvement grew after the untimely death of Karl Slym. It is only recently that he handed over the reins of the company to Guenter Butschek, who comes with a lot of experience on his shoulders from Airbus and Daimler. The appointment of Mayank Pareek as the President of Tata Motors was also during the same period and has a positive effect on the company as a whole.

Tata Tiago

We first saw the Zest making headway into a segment, which was in fact created by Tata Motors and then came the replacement to the Indica Vista - the Bolt. The launch of the Tiago hatchback was marred with a renaming controversy and delays but the car did manage to win over Indian audiences by being well-designed, well equipped and most importantly, well priced. Of course, roping in a global brand ambassador like superstar footballer Lionel Messi did help the cause. The Tiago has brought in decent business in India and having received 50000 bookings, the company is looking to expand capacity to keep up with the demand. Tata's next offering for India will be it's flagship crossover, the Hexa. Having recently driven the Hexa, there's no doubt in our mind that, if the company prices it right, the SUV too might be able to do a healthy business.

The Tiago Campaign With Lionel Messi

That said, even the Hexa launch which was scheduled for much earlier this year has been delayed to January 2017 which in turn has had a domino effect on other more important and more mass market cars from the Tata stable. The Kite5 compact sedan has not been delayed to sometime mid-2017 while the Nexon compact SUV (which we think will be a real game changed from Tata Motors) has been delayed to later in 2017 too. Although these delays do give some breathing time for products to do well until a new one comes along, it does hamper the appeal of Tata Motors in the minds of the consumers who have been waiting for them.

Like his predecessor, Cyrus Mistry was passionate about cars and made it a point to attend Auto Shows across the world and take feedback from people about his company's cars. Cyrus Mistry is also a keen classic car enthusiast and commissioned one of the last Jaguar E-Type lightweights that were made last year by Jaguar after engineers discovered a few numbered chassis lying around in the corner of the factory that had never been assembled and finished in the 60s.

The Jaguar F-Pace Launch

Revenues of Tata Motors, the biggest contributor to the group in terms of sales, grew 5 per cent in the 2015-16 financial year, largely due to the solid performance of Jaguar Land Rover, which was acquired by Tata Motors during Ratan Tata's term for $2.3 billion. While Tata Motors was showing steady growth in India, Jaguar Land Rover was clearly making strides with not just sales but new car development. While having launched facelift versions of the XF and XJ, Jaguar saw the birth of two new cars - the XE and the F-Pace SUV. Land Rover too had a bunch of new cars up its sleeve like the Discovery Sport and the updated Evoque - all of which brought in the moolah and saw the company grow 13 per cent year-on-year. In fact, the company was all set to invest 3.75 billion Euros in the 2016-17 fiscal year. Cyrus Mistry was also instrumental in taking decisions like moving mass manufacturing out for the JLR group out of the United Kingdom to countries like Brazil, China and Slovakia, which was against the directive set by Ratan Tata at the time of the JLR acquisition.