Tata Purchase of Jaguar and Land Rover In Doubt

Edward Niedermeyer
by Edward Niedermeyer

As we reported yesterday, Ford's sale of Jaguar and Land Rover to India's Tata Motors is far from a done deal. In light of today's confirmation that the transaction will not go through this week as predicted, it looks like Tata's reach may exceed its grasp. Reuters questions the role the British brands would play amongst Tata's lineup of commercial-duty trucks and compact to sub-compact cars. Another issue: Tata's credit rating. It turns out that Moody's and Standard and Poor's placed Tata on review for a credit rating downgrade when the Indian firm emerged as the frontrunner for Jag/Landie. Not coincidentally, Tata's stock slid ten percent during its six month courtship of Ford's cast-offs, while the rest of the Indian stock index grew by nine percent. Speaking in Geneva, Rattan Tata was quoted as saying he remains "reasonably confident" that the deal will go through. Reasonably? Uh-oh.

Edward Niedermeyer
Edward Niedermeyer

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  • Cammy Corrigan Cammy Corrigan on Mar 04, 2008

    Mr Mehta, Prodrive own Aston Martin who used Middle Eastern financiers, but they have no say in how the company is run. And I would be careful about using that as a metric for what country owns what. Because GM and Ford are traded on the stock market which means, by your logic, GM and Ford aren't American but owned by many countries. According to Carlos Ghosn's book, Nissan is 44.4% owned by Renault (who subsequently own 15% of Renault), 6% by japanese companies and the rest are private pension firms. So, therefore, pension firms can make good cars.....

  • Sajeev Mehta Sajeev Mehta on Mar 04, 2008

    Though I do agree with you, I know people who don't want an Aston because of the new owners, sad as that sounds. I expect they'll be happy with an SL, even without any of that Aston craftsmanship or exclusivity. One thing I gotta add is that investors/VCs always have a "say," and they'll use it if the figures don't add up on the balance sheet. Whether they publicly admit that is irrelevant.

  • George Labrador George Labrador on Mar 04, 2008

    I suspect that the Indian firm would want to ship production to there own Country for these two vehicles, and I guess the "thorn" in the side would be the workers in England and there Union, its will be hard to move work to India I would think!

  • LDMAN1 LDMAN1 on Mar 05, 2008

    jthorner :"Jaguar and Land Rover need to be owned and staffed by Brits in order for there to be real “brand DNA”. DNA?! Inbreeding leads to genetic defects. Today, Land Rover owes its profitability to the Germans. L322 (New Range Rover) is a BMW product. The Germans reinvented the Brand away from Range Rover P38., NOT the Brits. Yes, BMW did rip off off-road technology in the process. Jaguar is nearly dead today because for years it was mainly staffed by Brits who sold cars designed solely by and for the Midlands, in North-America, mainly to their aging customer base. The nail in the coffin for Jag was spending a cool $1 Billion on X350 (New XJ) and making it look exactly like X300 (Old XJ) in order not to upset its British/WASP Customer base. As for Jaguar Brand DNA one word would suffice to illustrate my point: "Gorgeous." Incest has given Jaguar enough recessive genes for the next 50 generations.

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