Four in fray for top job at Tata Steel

With less than a year to go for H M Nerurkar as Tata Steel managing director, the race for the top job is hotting up.

The search is currently restricted to four candidates —Koushik Chatterjee, T V Narendran, Anand Sen and Partha Sengupta.  An announcement is likely by the end of December or first week of January.

When contacted, a Tata Steel spokesperson said the board will take a decision in this regard at an appropriate juncture.

Insiders, however, said that though Nerurkar’s term would come to an end in October 2013, the announcement would come by January next year, in keeping with the Tata group practices. The group had announced Ratan Tata’s successor a year in advance.

Chatterjee, group chief financial officer, was inducted into the Tata Steel board last month. Though traditionally a Tata Steel managing director has always been from the operations side, sources pointed out that times were changing. Chatterjee played a critical role in number-crunching when Corus was acquired.

There is, however, also a buzz that Chatterjee could make it to the Tata Sons board. Tata Sons Finance Director, Ishaat Hussain, became a non-executive director in September on turning 65, the cut-off age for executive directors.

“Ideally the company would look at someone who was equally acceptable to the Indian and European operations. Tata Steel Europe was going through a critical phase and just a week back proposed 900 job cuts. It needs to be managed cautiously,” sources close to the development said.

The argument in favour of Narendran, vice president, safe and flat products, is that he was actively involved in Tata Steel’s first acquisition, NatSteel. He played a key role in the integration process, as well.

Anand Sen, vice president, is in charge of the company’s Kalinganagar project. The Kalinganagar project, though delayed by about five years, happens to be one of the few greenfield projects in the country that is close to being commissioned. The project is expected to be commissioned in August 2014.

Partha Sengupta, on the other hand, is vice president (raw materials), one of the key divisions for Tata Steel.

“There is some talk that there could be two chief operating officers also. One could be in charge of Kalinganagar and the other Jamshedpur,” a source added.

Incidentally, the post of COO in Tata Steel first came into being with Nerurkar assuming the role in 2007.