Behind every billionaire there is a story!

Ratan Tata turns 70 years old

After celebrating his 70th birthday on Friday, Ratan Tata would in the normal course of affairs be facing mandatory retirement from the Tata Group. Two years ago, however, India’s most respected and acquisitive conglomerate ex­tended to 75 the age until which non-executive directors could serve, giving the man who has transformed it over the past 16 years a new lease at its helm. Although corporate governance purists at the time criticised the change as retrograde, it is a decision that few investors now regret.

In 1991, when he succeeded his uncle, J.R.D. Tata, a man who was to India what Fiat’s Giovanni Agnelli was to postwar Italy, few expected the group to survive the onslaught of liberalisation. It earned most of its money in stodgy domestic industries dependent on the centrally planned “licence raj”. The government told companies how much they could produce and protected them from foreign competitors. The family held only small stakes in many of the 300-odd group companies. Powerful barons ran the main businesses as rival fiefs.

Mr Tata was forced to earn rather than command respect. A shy man, he rarely features in the society glossies, drives himself to work in a Tata car and has lived for years in a book-crammed, dog-filled bachelor flat in Mumbai’s Colaba district. His gentle, kind manner engenders loyalty. Tata remains unfocused – he is arguably the glue that binds a sprawling assortment of stakes in 98 companies – but it is professionally man­aged and globally competitive: more than 60 per cent of its forecast $50bn sales this year are overseas.

read the rets published by FT here:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/94b77e52-b563-11dc-896e-0000779fd2ac.html