Tata Sons

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Shaping Science is made possible with the generous support of Tata Sons.

N. Chandrashekaran, the chairman of Tata Sons, has visited Air India's Delhi headquarters about half a dozen times this year.

And he's a busy man.

Considering all the boardroom drama, his running feud with Noel Tata, the chief of Tata Trust has stirred up.

They told us that a cost-centric mindset is being knitted into the organization.

And that is for good reason.

Air India had been losing money for years before Tata Sons bought it back from the government in 2022, nine decades after launching it.

I had done an episode on their latest losses just last month and I've linked it in the show notes below if you want to give it a listen.

Now, as I was saying, Air India definitely needs to save every rupee it can.

He doesn't want the company to be listed, and he wants it to remain in private hands.

On the other side is N. Chandrasekaran, the chair of Tata Sons, which is the holding company of this group, who has come around to list this company now, and the crucial vote to back him and to back the listing does not belong to Noel Tata and does not belong to Chandrasekaran.

It belongs to a complete outsider named Venu Srinivasan.

Okay, so it really comes down to this one guy.

According to Forbes, he's worth $7 billion.

He owns a motorbike company called the TVS Group.

He's a motorcycle enthusiast, and he was brought on the board of the Tata Group by Noel's elder half-brother, who was the long-term chair of both Tata Sons, the holding company, and the largest shareholder of this holding company, which are charitable bodies called Tata Trusts.

So for the last 10 years, Venu Srinivasan has been on the board, but now is the first time when he's going against the wishes of the largest shareholder, which he represents, and that's what makes his vote so crucial.

To learn more about the New York Academy of Sciences, including information on upcoming events, visit us online at nyas.org and follow us at nyasciences.

Shaping Science is made possible with the generous support of Tata Sons.

The trusts are opaque.

We have no idea what the power levers within the trust are, but the trust owns 66% of an entity called Tata Sons.

Now, 18.4% of Tata Sons is held by another group, Shapurji Pallonji, which has long ties with the Tata family.

They were a construction group based in Mumbai that over time has developed these ties.

And the Tata Sons also owns 29% of Tata Industries.

Now, Tata Sons then has minority holdings in 29 publicly traded companies.

And I've listed some of them down here.

And they range the spectrum.

Their full names are Noel Nawal Tata and Natarajan Chandrashekharan.

Chandrashekharan would go on to join TCS as a software intern in 1987, then climb through the ranks till he's known just as Chandra and then in 2009 become TCS's CEO and in 2017 become the first non-Parsi chairman of Tata Sons, the holding company behind India's most powerful business group.

As boards go, perhaps there isn't a greater board in India than the Tata board.

It steers a 158-year-old conglomerate with multiple dozens of companies and that collectively generate over $180 billion in revenue and employ over 1 million people.

In FY25, TCS paid Tata Sun's its largest dividend ever, Rs 32,722 crore.

Between 2000 and 2026, TCS contributed close to 80% of Tata San's total dividend income and buyback proceeds, 2.7 lakh crores.

Using this dividend income, Tata Sons made a cumulative equity investment of 1.8 lakh crores in its group companies.

So yes, TCS saved the Tata's too.

The Essar Group is back with a eighteen billion dollar steel project, but it's in the United States.

How foreign investors are buying into real estate, and the logjam within logjams as Tata Trusts comes up with a merger proposal to save Tata Sons from listing.

[on-hold music]

This is a call report with Govindraj Ethiraj.

CBRE officials said that this is a landmark quarter for India's real estate capital markets, and global investors have returned with conviction, and institutional capital is now flowing well beyond offices and land into data centers and reflects how deep and diverse India's real estate market has become.

CBRE, in a report quoted by Business Standard, also said that India's real estate sector has already attracted about eighteen point six billion dollars in the first nine months of twenty twenty-six, nearly twice the corresponding period for twenty twenty-five and more than the fourteen billion dollars roughly recorded in the whole of twenty twenty-five.

[upbeat music] The Tata Trust, which owns sixty-six percent of Tata Sons and is presently in the midst of a pitched battle with the Tata Sons board and its chairman, N. Chandrasekaran, has proposed merging Tata Electronic System Solutions Private Limited and Tata Consulting Engineers with Tata Sons Private Limited.

Both companies are a hundred percent subsidiaries of Tata Sons.