Chandra, Ralf Speth join Tata Sons board

N Chandrasekaran heads TCS whereas, Speth was appointed as CEO of Jaguar Land Rover in February 2010

In keeping with the tradition of promoting group company CEOs to the Tata group holding company, Tata Sons’ board, Ralf Speth, CEO of Jaguar Land Rover, and N Chandrasekaran, CEO & Managing Director of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), were appointed as additional directors on its Board.

“This is in recognition of their exemplary leadership in their companies,” Ratan N Tata, Interim Chairman of Tata Sons, said.

Both Chandrasekaran, 53, and Speth, 61, are running the most successful operations of the Tata group.

Earlier during the tenure of Ratan Tata, RK Krishna Kumar, MD of Tata Tea and JJ irani, MD of Tata Steel were also appointed on Tata Sons board. Similarly, late JRD Tata had appointed late Sumant Moolgaokar and late Darbari Seth on the TSL board.

Chandra, as TCS CEO is popularly known, is credited with where TCS is today. The company has market value of Rs 472,636 crore as on Tuesday. It reported revenues of Rs 23,000 crore in September quarter and made profit of Rs 5958 crore, according to BSE filings.

Ralf Speth, 61, was appointed as CEO of Jaguar Land Rover in February 2010 after he served BMW for 20 years. Under his leadership, JLR continued to show strong global sales, despite the China slowdown and reported a strong growth in the key markets of North America and Europe.

With the two new directors, the Tata Sons board now has a balance of experience industrialists and CEOs. In August 25th this year, Ajay Piramal, Chairman of Piramal and Shriram groups, and Venu Srinivasan, Chairman of TVS Motor and Sundaram Clayton had joined the board of Tata Sons Ltd as non-executive directors.

Apart from the new appointees, the Tata Sons board now has Ishaat Hussain, former CFO, Tata Sons, Vijay Singh, former Defence Secretary of India, Nitin Nohria, Dean of Harvard Business School, Ronen Sen, Former Indian Ambassador to USA and Farida Khambata, global strategist firm, Cartica as other directors. Mistry, who was ousted as Chairman on Monday, continues to remain on board as a director.

The appointment of Chandra and Speth will help Ratan Tata’s move to bring the group back on its tracks.  Apart from the unceremonious exit of Mistry as Chairman of Tata Sons, the $ 103-billion revenue group is currently facing headwinds with few of its group companies.

Take for example, Tata Steel’s European operations was in talks for a joint venture with Germany’s ThyssenKrupp to sell its rest of Europe operations. But there has been no headway. The group is also fighting a bitter court battle with Japanese telecom major, NTT Docomo over the exit price of Docomo from Tata Teleservices.  The group currently earns 69 per cent of its revenues from its global operations and is selling non-core assets across the world.