Coventry-based Nick Seale of the Warwick Manufacturing Group believes that the takeover will also be of global and historic significance. Seale said: "When the history of the motor industry is written, they will look back on this event as one of the key turning points.
The new car market is estimated at around 30,000 units a year in sales in a good year, whereas the used car market for luxury vehicles is estimated at around 60,000 cars annually.
Just hours after returning to Mumbai, Ravi Kant, managing director, and C Ramakrishnan, CFO of Tata Motors addressed the press on a conference call. Excerpts from the call.
Tata Motors is expected to sign the agreement to buy the two Ford-owned luxury marques, Jaguar and Land Rover in the next few days. Tatas are expected to pay $3 billion for the coveted brands. According to sources, Tata Motors, India's largest auto making company, has agreed to most of the clauses put forward by Ford and Unite (workers union of the two brands), including the condition that Tata Motors will not shift the manufacturing facilities of the two brands.
Tata Motors, India's largest commercial vehicle maker, has postponed plans for an overseas equity issue and sale of investments to repay the $3 billion bridge loan it took in June last year to acquire the Jaguar and Land Rover brands from Ford.
A year after the Tata group took over the two of Britain's most iconic automobile brands, Jaguar and Land Rover, it is faced with newer and bigger challenges than it would have expected when it paid $2.3 billion to Ford for the acquisitions on March 26, 2008.
Despite what the Nano can do to the country's automobile market, its ability to transform Tata Motors' financials will be limited, says Shyamal Majumdar.
Tata's comments come a little over two weeks after JLR management and its workers agreed to a two-year pay freeze, subject to no compulsory layoffs for the next two years. This is also the first time the Tata chairman has made a direct public appeal to the UK government for credit support.
Meetings to break the deadlock have been planned.
'You declare a date, time and place for the landing two months in advance and exactly at that moment, it touched on the moon.'
Mahindra & Mahindra, the Indian carmaker, confirmed Tuesday that it had pulled out of a $1bn joint venture with Renault and Nissan to set up a factory near Chennai.
The company is still short of over Rs 4500 crore (Rs 45 billion) to refinance the debt which is due before June 2 this year. The company had planned to raise the fund for refinancing through three routes. It planned to raise about Rs 4200 crore through rights issues which it managed after the issue devolved on underwriters in October as the stock prices were tumbling globally following the economic crisis.
Will the Indian auto giant manage to take Jaguar and Land Rover off Ford's hands?
Asked if the lander was 'damaged' during the 'hard landing", Sivan said: "That we do not know".
With the US economy in a downturn, it could be a while before the Jaguar and Land Rover business turns around. For the first half of 2008, JLR has posted losses of $383 million on sales of $ 7.07 billion, a disclosure that saw the Tata Motors stock fall 5 per cent on September 23.
ISRO on Friday released a set of visuals of the Moon captured by cameras positioned on the Lander Module of Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft.
Bajaj Auto's margins are expected to expand 100 basis points, as volumes have recovered.
Newcastle United midfielder Joey Barton was released from jail on Monday after serving 2-1/2 months of a six-month sentence for attacking a teenager last year.
More than a decade after the iconic race car brand Jaguar was forced to pull out from the gruelling 24-hour Le Mans race, the new owner, the Rs 16,400-crore Tata Motors, is considering a plan to put the brand back on the racing track.
After a string of foreign deals in the last few years, including Tata Motors' purchase of Land Rover and Jaguar brands from Ford for $2.3 billion this year, attempts by Indian companies to acquire assets abroad are increasingly hitting roadblocks. At least, the recent attempts by Indian companies suggest so.
Speaking to MPs from the West Midlands in the House of Commons during his recent visit, Tata said jobs at the research centres at Whitley and Gaydon were secure at least until 2012. A fresh business plan is expected to be drawn up for the company in 2012. Coventry South MP Jim Cunningham told reporters after the meeting that Tata indicated the possibility of employing more workers at the two centres.
So what's special about the Kaziranga range? Rajesh Karkera and Hitesh Harisinghani find out.
Tata Motors made waves when it bought the Jaguar and Land Rover brands. Test your knowledge about the erstwhile owner of these brands -- Henry Ford.
Tata Motors has succeeded in securing a $3bn banking facility for its purchase of Jaguar and Land Rover from Ford Motor, which should clear the way for the deal to close next week. Tata's ability to raise the money in spite of the turmoil on debt markets represents a vote of confidence in the Indian company and removes one of the last main obstacles to the deal.
"The toughest part was continuing to believe that we could do it," Tata told journalists covering the Auto Expo in New Delhi, where he unveiled the lowest-priced car in the world. He added that "a promise is a promise", hinting at the ability of his company to deliver even in the face of brutal scepticism.
American auto giant Ford is likely to retain a stake and continue supplying engines and some of the components for Jaguar and Land Rover, even after the sale of the two British luxury brands, media reports said in the United Kingdom.
India's corporate honchos spent a considerable time and energy this year at deal tables and executed over thousand transactions involving sale or purchase of equity stakes in their companies. On an average, every single day of 2007 saw about three deals being announced. This included a total of 1,047 merger and acquisitions as well as private equity deals for a total value of $68.32 billion (about Rs 2,75,000 crore).
People close to Indian carmakers Tata Motors and Mahindra & Mahindra, and the buy-out group One Equity Partners, said on Tuesday that they expected Ford to respond imminently to their revised offers made last week.
"The panel's report is awaited. The committee has been given a guideline to prepare the mission before the end of next year," a senior ISRO official said. "There is a good launch window in November".
India's largest automotive group said it had received 203,000 pre-paid orders worth Rs25bn ($507m) for the Nano, the world's cheapest car, which it put on sale for a 16-day booking period which ended on April 25.
From Maruti to Honda, every big manufacturer has lined up launches in the domestic market.
'Vikram' with rover 'Pragyaan' housed inside is scheduled for a powered-descent between 1 am and 2 am on September 7, followed by its touchdown between 1.30 am and 2.30 am.
Chandrayaan 3 follows the Chandrayaan 2 mission which did not achieve the desired soft landing on the surface of the moon in 2019, disappointing the scientists.
The report says Tata Motors, JLR's new owners, will produce 200-300 less cars by the end of the year. That would be equal to about a week's worth of production for the Jaguar models of XJ and XK.
'SUV is a very intensely fought category, unlike hatchbacks and cars.'
The Luna-25 spacecraft crashed into the Moon after it spun into an uncontrolled orbit, Russia's Roscosmos space agency said on August 20.
Ford said its Jaguar F1 team would pull out at the end of the 2004 season and its Cosworth engine company was also up for sale.
Vikram (with rover 'Pragyan' housed inside) is expected to touch down on the lunar surface on September 7, between 1.30 am and 2.30 am.
