RATAN NAVAL TATA

 

(Born 28 December 1937)

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Ratan Naval Tata (born 28 December 1937) is the present chairman of Tata Sons and therefore, Tata Group.^[2] He is also the chairman of major Tata companies such as Tata Steel, Tata Motors, Tata Power, Tata Consultancy Services, Tata Tea, Tata Chemicals, The Indian Hotels Company and Tata Teleservices.

Early Life and Education:

Ratan Tata was adopted by Naval Tata and Soonoo Commisariat in the Tata family, a prominent family belonging to the Parsi community. He is the great-grandson of Tata group founder Jamsedji Tata. After his parents separated in 1944, he was brought up by his grandmother Lady Navajbai and did his schooling in Mumbai from Campion School. Later, he enrolled in Cornell University, where he earned a B.S in architecture with structural engineering in 1962, and has also completed the Advanced Management Program at Harvard Business School .

Career at TATA Sons:

When he returned to India in 1962 after turning down a job with IBM on the advice of Jehangir Ratanji Dadabhoy Tata (JRD TATA), he was sent to Jamshedpur to work on the shop floor at Tata Steel with other blue-collar employees. In 1971, he was appointed the Director of National Radio and Electronics (Nelco). For his next assignment, in 1977 he was asked to turn around the sick Empress Mills, which he did. However, he was refused a Rs. 50 lacs investment required to make the textile unit competitive. Empress Mills floundered and was finally closed in 1986. In 1981, JRD Tata stepped down as Tata Industries chairman, naming Ratan as his successor. He was heavily criticized for lacking experience in running a company of the scale of Tata Industries. In 1991, he was appointed as a group chairman of the Tata group. In August 2007, Ratan Tata led Tata Group's acquisition of British steel maker Corus. At that time, this was the largest takeover of a foreign company by an Indian company, and resulted in Tata Group becoming the fifth largest steel producer in the world.

Tata is set to retire in December, 2012; a search has been underway for a successor since August 2010. In August 2011, the company reported having narrowed the choice down to three people, though no details were reported on who was being considered.

Net Worth:

As of 2011, Ratan Tata has an income whose net worth is US $ 970 million. He does not figure in the Forbes' list of Indian millionaires because a large number of the shares (around 65.8%) of Tata Sons, the holding company of the Tata Group, is held by charitable trusts.

Honours, Awards and International Recognition:

Ratan Tata serves in senior capacities in various organisations in India and he is a member of the Prime Minister's Council on Trade and Industry. Tata is on the board of governors of the East-West Center, the advisory board of RAND's Center for Asia Pacific Policy and serves on the program board of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's India AIDS initiative.

Ratan Tata's foreign affiliations include membership of the international advisory boards of the Mitsubishi Corporation, the American International Group, JP Morgan Chase and Booz Allen Hamilton. He is also a member of the board of trustees of the RAND Corporation, University of Southern California and Cornell University. He also serves as a board member on the Republic of South Africa's International Investment Council and is a member of the Asia-Pacific advisory committee for the New York Stock Exchange. In 2010, he joined BMB Group as an advisory board member.

Year	Name	Awarding organization
2010	Honorary Doctor of Laws	Pepperdine University.
2010	Legend in Leadership Award	Yale University.
2010	Businessman of the Decade	Federation of Indo-Israel Chambers of Commerce.
2008	Honorary Doctor of Science	Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur.
2008	Honorary Doctor of Law	University of Cambridge.
2007	Honorary Fellow	London School of Economics.
2007	Honorary Citizen of Singapore	Singapore government.
2007	Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy	Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
2005	Honorary Doctor of Science	University of Warwick.
2004	Honorary Degree of Doctor of Technology	Asian Institute of Technology.
2004	Honorary Economic Advisor	Hangzhou, China.
2004	Honorary Doctor of Business Administration	Ohio State University.