A happy Tata
TATA, one of India's two largest and most widely diversified business groups, has�after much dithering�decided to launch its software gem, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), on the stockmarket. Only 14% of the firm's shares are being sold on July 29th. But, with a price band of Rs775-900 ($16.80-19.50) a share, this will be the most valuable share issue yet by a private firm in India, likely to raise over $1 billion and to give a boost, at home and abroad, to the image both of TCS and of the Tata group.
Ratan Tata (pictured), the group's chairman, says that the main reason to float TCS is to realise growth that, inside the group, would be constrained. As Gartner, a research firm, put it earlier this month, the hope is that TCS will stop being a �sleeping giant� and instead become more dynamic and internationally significant. Executives are coy about how that dynamism might emerge, but S. Ramadorai, TCS's chief executive, says that �we will be more free to go for mergers and acquisitions and to take care of employees with stock options.�
Founded in 1968, TCS has long been a leader in the development of India's booming information technology (IT) industry. Indeed, it now claims to be Asia's largest IT company, with sales in the latest financial year of $1.5 billion and 28,000 employees of 30 nationalities working in 32 countries. They seem to like working for TCS: it has an unusually low (by Indian standards) employee attrition rate of about 6.5% a year. It pioneered offshore operations when it began working in America in 1973 and now offers services to firms spanni"
