Ratan Tata Failure: India's top businessman and philanthoropist Ratan Tata on late Wednesday night passed away at the age of 86. Ratan Tata died due to age-related complications at the Mumbai's Breach Candy Hospital. Ratan Tata was admitted in hospital on Monday but he turned down reports that his health is in critical conditions and appealed the well-wishers to not spread misinformed reports. However, after being admitted in the hospital, Ratan Tata was shifted to ICU and ultimately he died on October 9, 2024. Ratan Tata was known for his brilliant business mind and philanthoropy. Even after being retired from the TATA company, Ratan Tata continued to support Indian startups by investing in them. However, there is one failure of Ratan Tata that costed the company thousands of crores. Below is Ratan Tata's failure-
Ratan Tata's failure
Ratan Tata in one his address had amitted that he had made one mistake in his lifetime that resultued in a loss of thousands of crores for Tata Motors. The mistake was the branding of Nano as the ‘cheapest car’.
Addressing students at the convocation of the Great Lakes Institute of Management in the year 2015, Ratan Tata reportedly said, "Nano was made to reach out to people, (but) it never has. It is meant to be reachable throughout India with our dealerships. But we made our bunch of mistakes."
However, as per Ratan Tata, the launch of Nano was a great success, one that went beyond expectations.
A few years ago, former Tata motors chairman Cyrus Mistry had revealed that Tata Motors and Tata Motor Finance had suffered a huge loss of nearly Rs 4,000 crore due to Tata Motor’s practice of lending without any risk assessment for Tata Nano and other small commercial vehicles. As per him, the NPAs were huge, and although the easy finance artificially bolstered the market share figures, Tata motors saw a steep drop in the volumes of small commercial vehicles (SCV) and the Nano as soon as this was reigned in, with SCVs’ volumes falling by more than 50%.
Nevertheless, despite the mistake, it is no denying that Ratan Tata was among one of the most brilliant minds that impacted the lives of the common people in India in many positive ways. Even with Nano, Ratan Tata's vision was to fulfill the 'car dream' of middle class families of India.