Tata Motors Buys Jaguar and Land Rover for $2.9b

Farago said it might never happen, but it did: Tata's bought Land Rover and Jaguar. Bloomberg says the announcement will come tomorrow morning, perhaps even before the NYSE opens for the day. Tata has purchased Land Rover and Jaguar for $2.65 billion, or about the cost of dinner for four people at a pub in London. As we've said all along, the best English high tea in the world isn't served in England; it's in Hong Kong and India. So 150 years after flooding China with so much opium that the Chinese government started two wars with England to get it to stop, Chinese businesses bought what remained of Rover. Now the Indians are having their turn, as Indian industrial giant Tata (recently in the news for selling the cheapest new automobile in the world), have completed the deal to buy the former crown jewels of the British automotive manufacturing industry, Jaguar and Land Rover. Ford purchased Jaguar in 1990 for $2.5 billion and Land Rover in 2000 for $2.73 billion, making this a multi-billion dollar loss even if they hadn't been operating the companies for a total of 25 business years. Here's to hoping for a brighter future for these storied companies.

Parent company Tata Group, which also owns units making tea, software and salt, is steering acquisitions by Indian corporations abroad. The group, led by Ratan Tata, bought steelmaker Corus Group Plc for $12.9 billion last year in the biggest-ever purchase by an Indian company. The Tata Motors division signed agreements in 2003 to buy the Daewoo Commercial Vehicle Co. for $102 million, its first overseas acquisition.

Tata
Tata Motors controls more than half of India's truck market and about 17 percent of the nation's passenger-car sales. The division was established in 1945 to build locomotives and other engineering products and entered the truck market in 1954 with technology from the former Daimler-Benz AG. The unit unveiled a $2,500 car, called the Nano, in January.
The sale will end two decades of Ford ownership of British luxury brands. The era began in 1987 when Ford bought a controlling interest in Aston Martin, a maker of sports cars costing $100,000 or more.

Ford purchased Jaguar two years later for $2.5 billion and Land Rover in 2000 for $2.73 billion. Under Chief Executive Officer Alan Mulally Ford began to unwind the strategy when it sold Aston Martin last year.