“Tata Sons met today with a single point agenda to name Chandra”, Ishaat Hussain, a director at the parent company and chairman of Tata Consultancy, said by phone on Thursday. Chandrasekaran, who is fondly known as Chandra, took over as TCS CEO and MD in 2009.
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Chandrasekaran, who has been in the Tata Group for around 30 years, will be the first person outside the Tata extended family and the first non-Zoroastrian, to head the group in its 148-year history.
Ending two months of speculation, Tata Sons appointed Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) managing director and chief executive officer N Chandrasekaran as Executive Chairman following unanimous recommendation of the selection committee. “There will be always business challenges, there are always ups and downs, but over the last 150 years, the management teams of different companies, the tall leaders at Tata Sons and group company levels, have been phenomenal”, he said. I am aware that this role comes with huge responsibilities. “But it was probably his stint at TCS that has made him more humble”. He will take over from Ratan Tata, who served as the interim chief following Cyrus Mistry’s ouster from the position.
Apart from the section committee, they added, N.A. Soonawala, the vice-chairman of the Tata Trusts that own a majority stake in Tata Sons, and R.K. Krishna Kumar, an old-time Ratan Tata confidant and a Tata Trusts trustee were closely involved in discussions on the next chairman. He is also part of India’s business task forces for Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Japan and Malaysia. “He has steered TCS so ably and one can confidently say that he will do the same with Tata Sons”, Mahalingam said. He has completed several marathons around the world including in Amsterdam, Boston, Chicago, Berlin, Mumbai, New York, Prague, Stockholm and Tokyo. Other candidates reportedly included Pepsico’s Indra Nooyi, former Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin, and Noel Tata, managing director of Tata International. India’s top industrial group was founded in 1868 by Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata, from the minority Parsee community, that traces its roots to Iran.
But the feud is threatening its reputation and has helped wipe around US$9 billion off the collective stock market value of the group’s eight main companies. To support Gopinathan, TCS also named N Ganapathy Subramaniam as the company’s president and chief operating officer.
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Chandrasekaran’s appointment came on a day when TCS put up a better than expected performance for the third quarter ended December 31.
