Ratan Naval Tata handed away earlier this week at a hospital in Mumbai. Tata Group’s chairman emeritus was India Inc’s most-loved and revered chief. As a number of business doyens mentioned of their tribute to Ratan Tata, what he mentioned was considered common fact. Ratan Tata’s demise marks the tip of a unprecedented company journey, one which not solely made Tata Group a worldwide large but additionally set new benchmarks for Indian business on the world map.
Beneath his visionary management, Tata Group’s income surged from $4 billion in 1991 to over $100 billion by 2012, when he retired, making it the primary Indian enterprise group to attain this feat. One main milestone on this was the IPO of the group’s software program firm — Tata Consultancy Providers — within the yr 2004. TCS made historical past with the primary $1 billion preliminary public providing (IPO) by a private-sector firm in India. TCS is Tata Group’s most beneficial and India’s second-largest firm in market cap.
Ratan Tata led TCS’ public itemizing. He even took half in some roadshows performed for the TCS IPO. Writing for Financial Occasions, Sunil Sanghai, founder and CEO of NovaaOne Capital, shared an incident from the TCS IPO that confirmed how, as he wrote, “the tallest member of the Indian business (Ratan Tata) remembered each contribution and it was essential for him to recognise them.”
Sanghai on Ratan Tata’s particular request for TCS CEO to SEBI chief
July 2004, with torrential Bombay monsoon lashing exterior, Mr. Ratan Tata obtained off the rostrum on the Ball room of Taj Mahal Lodge, Colaba. He had simply introduced the launch of Tata Consultancy Providers (TCS) Preliminary Public Providing (IPO), essentially the most high-profile IPO of Indian capital markets then. There have been fairly a number of capital market gamers and media folks nonetheless ready to work together with him. On this chaos he expressed his keenness to go meet the then SEBI Chairman, Mr. G N Bajpai. Nearly at no discover, I, a younger funding banker then, was handed the duty of establishing this assembly at SEBI’s Nariman Level workplace.
I used to be clueless as to why Mr. Tata would wish to rush to satisfy the SEBI chairman, and that too in such moist climate situations. He had barely accomplished a really profitable launch convention and there have been folks nonetheless wanting to satisfy him. However after we arrived on the SEBI headquarters, I used to be pleasantly shocked with the agenda of the assembly.
Mr. Tata began the assembly by saying, he requested for a brief discover assembly for 2 causes. First, he needed to thank SEBI for his or her assist by way of the IPO course of. Second, and equally importantly, in his persuasive deep voice he mentioned that Mr. F C Kohli, first CEO of TCS, had been instrumental in constructing an establishment like TCS for the Tata Group. Mr. Tata due to this fact expressed his want to allot one share to Mr. F C Kohli as a symbolic gesture in recognition of his contribution.
In one other gesture of his humility, the bankers who accompanied Mr. Tata for the TCS IPO roadshow have been very pleasantly shocked to obtain a handwritten private letter of appreciation from him. These small acts and values in totality are what made Mr. Tata the Redwood tree of the Indian company world – the tallest determine that leaves a mark that stays with you at all times.