Dismissing adverse comments on Jaguar and Land Rover (JLR) buy, Ratan Tata on Tuesday said the $2.3-billion acquisition of the iconic brands was 'worthwhile' though the subsequent financial crisis posed challenges.
Fraught four-month-long negotiation between Tata Motors-owned Jaguar Land Rover and the United Kingdom government over a loan guarantee ended in an anti-climax on Tuesday, with the Mumbai-headquartered automobile maker announcing that it has secured loans from commercial banks and would not need any support from the UK government.
Tata Motors on Tuesday said it expects to meet the funding requirement for the British marquees Land Rover without the loan guarantees from the UK government, which welcomed the development.
Mizuho Financial Group has an alliance with the Rs 8,500 crore (Rs 85 billion) Tata Capital, the financial services arm of the Tata group.
The package consists of a three-year committed facility to finance Land Rover's parts and accessories' inventories and receivables in the UK and the US. This is an important element of JLR's working capital financing to cover the key Land Rover parts and accessories' inventories and receivables part of our business, which has a high cash requirement, to function properly.
Tata Motors has roped in international consultants Roland Berger Strategy Consultants (based in Munich) and KPMG to help its British car brands Jaguar-Land Rover trim costs and help manage cash flow.
The country's largest automobile maker's total income from operations, however, fell 7.56 per cent to Rs 6,404.63 crore (Rs 64.04 billion) in the first quarter, the company said in a statement. While the passenger vehicle segment grew by 1.13 per cent at 72,216 units, but the sales of commercial vehicles fell by 4.85 per cent at 49,904 units in Q1 of this fiscal.
Reportedly insists on no loan guarantee if the government is not allowed any say in the company's future.
Jaguar X-TYPE, an 8-yr-old range, constituted nearly a fourth of annual production till now.
In a statement correcting media stories that appeared on Sunday suggesting its plants would be shut for longer, a company spokersperson said, "The reality is that our annual summer shutdown begins at the end of next week (July 23) as scheduled and will last for two weeks, with the plants due to restart on August 10. This two-week break is actually a week shorter than the traditional three-week break our plants have previously had."
The car is the first from the luxury brand to feature Jaguar's next-generation aerospace-inspired aluminium body architecture. The model was showcased in the presence of a well known chat show host Jay Leno.
A JLR spokesperson said this offer will apply to nearly 6,000 of its 14,500 employees who are categorised as salaried employees. The rest of the workers are paid weekly. He further said 25 per cent of those to whom this offer was made have already accepted it.
The list of '10 Cars That Changed The World' also features the Ford Model T, the Volkswagen Beetle, the Trabant, the Porsche 911, the Ford Mustang, the AMC Eagle, the Jeep Cherokee, the Dodge Caravan and the Toyota Prius. 'These vehicles changed people's lifestyles and habits as well as automakers' long-term strategies. Some even changed governments,' the magazine said in an accompanying report.
Come Sunday, India's automobile industry will achieve a unique distinction of showcasing both the world's cheapest car Nano and two of the costliest brands -- Jaguar and Land Rover -- from the Tata Group.
'We announced a $500 million investment plan for India. I have not received a single call from either the US or Bangkok (Ford's Asian centre of operations) asking me to freeze the investment programme or to scale it down,' says Michael Boneham, MD, Ford India.
Tata Motors will see 'strong operational recovery of its domestic business, which we believe should be the prime driver of stock valuations', Merrill Lynch said in a research report, adding that 'Jaguar Land Rover is likely to recover next year'.
If the UK government's help does not come soon, Indian owner Tata Motors will have to cut down its investment plans for Jaguar Land Rover with possible job losses and plant closures, a media report said.
Announcing that the company had completed its fund raising for repayment of the bridge loan taken to acquire British marquee car brands Jaguar and Land Rover, Tata Motors said this was achieved by extending the final maturity of $1 billion by 18 months up to December 31, 2010.
Rebound in IT majors TCS and Infosys in late trades helped markets end higher.
The British government has said it was "not prepared" to accept an announcement by Tata Steel and its European subsidiary, Corus, that there seemed no option but to indefinitely suspend operations at one of the latter's factories in north-east England, which means loss of around 2,000 jobs.
In an interview published in the Sunday Times on Sunday, Ratan Tata admitted with hindsight that he might have gone too far too fast, but that nobody saw the economic recession coming.
Tata Motors, India's largest commercial vehicle maker, is in the process of raising Rs 5,000 crore through a bond issue to refinance the remaining $ 2 billion (Rs 10,000 crore) bridge loan it took to acquire Jaguar and Land Rover.
The fate of Indian conglomerate Tata group-owned Jaguar Land Rover is uncertain as talks with the UK government over a financial support package has virtually failed, media reports say.
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.
The India foray of the two brands, which debuted in 1922 and 1948, respectively, has been hastened by their new Indian owner, Tata Motors, which took over in 2008 from Ford Motor Company of the US. The spokesperson said Tata Motors would be the distributor of these brands in India.
Sunday Times reports Tata Group has agreed in principle to invest pound 100 million alongside refinancing.
Tata Group ranks 13th, Reliance Industries 15th and Infosys 26th. Tata Group and Reliance Industries have been ranked ahead of American industrial conglomerate General Electric (17), German car manufacturer BMW (20), Japanese auto firm Honda Motor (22) and telecom major AT&T (23), among others. However, while the Tata Group slipped in ranking from the sixth place in 2008, Reliance Industries has improved on its previous year's 19th rank. Infosys was not in the list in 2008.
The board of the Luxembourg-based European Investment Bank on Tuesday approved a pound 340 million (Rs 2,500 crore) loan to the Tatas-owned Jaguar Land Rover to support efforts to make low-emission cars.
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.
After months of negotiations, Tata Motors-owned Jaguar Land Rover is likely to get approval for a loan of pound 270 million (about Rs 2,000 crore) from the European Investment Bank on April 7, BBC reported on Saturday quoting official sources.
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.
The Nano may ultimately be a winner but cannot turn around the company in the near term. For the present, Tata Motors continues to stare at a weak demand for both commercial vehicles as also cars. While CV volumes were lower by 51 per cent y-o-y in January 2009, compared with a fall of 46 per cent y-o-y in the December 2008 quarter, to revert to the mean could take a while given that the downturn in the economy persists.
The UK government today approved a grant of pound 27 million to Tata Group-owned Jaguar Land Rover
They were touted as prestigious takeover trophies won abroad, but there is no mention of the Tatas at the Internet addresses of luxurious car brands Jaguar and Land Rover.
Some investors warned of a coming British or even global recession as sterling collapsed to hit its lowest since 1985.
Tata Sons, the holding firm of the Tata group, and a few group companies have pledged part of their stakes in Tata Steel, Tata Power and Tata Teleservices (Maharashtra) to raise money for acquisitions and capital expenditure, according to disclosures made on Monday.On January 21, the Securities and Exchange Board of India made disclosure of pledged shares mandatory after it came to light that former Satyam Chairman B Ramalinga Raju had pledged almost his entire holding.
Tata Motors, which owns Jaguar and Land Rover, is in talks with the UK government on assistance for the luxury units as sales have plummeted.
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.
Corporate India is in for a more painful period, as profitability will take a hit over the next six months, ICICI Bank CEO K V Kamath today warned and asked the industry to be patient for opportunities as the economy will start recovering in the second half of 2009.
Buoyed by the success of Chandrayaan-I, space scientists now plan to conquer new frontiers by sending a robot on moon in 2012 and a spacecraft to Mars the following year which will also see an Indian astronaut in space.
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