Tata Group: India’s New Global Challenger Tata, India’s largest company, operates in seven distinct business sectors, including automobiles, chemicals, IT, consumer products, engineering, and consulting. Altogether, Tata comprises more than 90 separate firms. The chairman of Tata Group is Ratan Tata, the charismatic descendent of the company founder. Now in his seventies, he has emerged as a popular and respected corporate titan, known around the world. An avid aviator, he often flies his own Falcon 2000 jet to meetings around India.
As the group’s chief visionary and dealmaker, Mr. Tata has been aggressively expanding the Tata Group into world markets. For example, one of the group subsidiaries, Tata Steel, recently purchased the Dutch-British steel giant Corus Group, for $13 billion. The move boosted the firm’s steel-making capacity fivefold. In 2008, another group subsidiary, Tata Motors, became the focus of world attention when it acquired Jaguar and Land Rover from Ford for $2.3 billion. Tata Motors launched the Nano in 2009 which, at approximately $2,500, is the world’s cheapest car. The Nano addresses a longtime dream of Ratan Tata to develop reliable but super cheap automobiles, revolutionize the global auto industry, and make India a major economic power. “Nano” means “small” in Gujarati, the language of Tata’s founders.
Background on the Tata Group
Founded in 1868 in Bombay as a textile trading company, Tata gradually expanded into hotels, power plants, chemicals, steel production, and several other industries. The government of India long discouraged international trade by imposing high trade barriers and bureaucracy. As these restrictions loosened in the 1990s, Tata’s international operations flourished. Tata Motors began producing cars in joint ventures with Fiat and Daimler-Benz. Tata bought 30 percent of the coal subsidiaries of an Indonesian mining company to supply coal for Tata’s power plant in India. Altogether, the Tata Group has factories in numerous emerging markets, including Kenya, South Korea, Malaysia, Russia, and Thailand.
As India’s biggest firm, Tata has many competitive advantages, including vast financial resources and access to capital on favorable terms; strong corporate image; connections with countless high-quality business partners; competitive cost structure, thanks to the huge, low cost Indian labor pool; and long-standing relationships with national and state governments in India. In the auto industry, Tata Motors’ reputation is growing. It counts on sister subsidiary Tata Steel to continuously provide steel to manufacture Nanos and other cars, a key advantage. The purchase of Corus Group, in addition to increasing steel capacity, also greatly expanded Tata’s access to automakers across Europe and the United States.
Tata is arguably the most important of the new global challenger firms charging out of big emerging markets such as China, Brazil, India, and Russia. The emerging giants tap abundant low-cost labor, tech talent, and mineral resources to increasingly target the world’s biggest growth markets. Brimming with cash and confidence, they export innovative business models honed in some of the world’s most challenging markets. Governments and state-owned enterprises influence the procurement activities of corporations. Tata capitalizes on its family"

Question

As it prepares to expand abroad, how can Tata Motors improve its corporate social responsibility toward future customers in emerging markets? What can the firm do to minimize the impact of its operations on the natural environment in Asia and elsewhere?