In India, Ratan Tata is being mourned as a towering business leader who took the sprawling family-controlled Tata Group into international markets while retaining its founding spirit of capitalism laced with philanthropy. But the UK has its own reasons to be grateful to the chair of the group from 1991 to 2012. Two heavy industries in the UK – steel and car-making – would almost certainly have shrunk even further without his style of long-termism.
Tata’s 2007 purchase of Corus, the merged British Steel and Dutch firm Koninklijke Hoogovens, was a terrible deal – appallingly timed and overpriced. Having agreed a takeover at 455p a share, the Indian group ended up paying 608p, or £6.2bn, after a Brazilian competitor emerged as a rival bidder. Steel prices promptly collapsed with the global financial crisis and the recession that followed. Steelmakers were losing money across Europe. Since Tata was assumed to be mostly interested in Corus’s more modern Dutch assets, the writing looked to be on the wall for the UK end.
