History
The company was the first private steel venture in India, and it began as an idea rather than a business. Jamsetji Tata wanted an Indian steel plant, the colonial government preferred to buy British steel, and it was his son Dorabji Tata who raised the money and got the Tata Iron and Steel Company incorporated on 26 August 1907 at Jamshedpur. The works began pig iron production in 1911 and steel in 1912, and the town of Sakchi, later renamed Jamshedpur, grew up around the plant.[1]
The early decades set a pattern the company still talks about. In 1920 it joined Burmah Oil to form the Tinplate Company of India, and the same year it introduced an eight hour working day. Free medical care, schools for employees' children, a provident fund, accident compensation, maternity benefit, a profit sharing bonus and a retirement gratuity all followed between 1915 and 1937, at a time when such benefits were unusual in Indian industry. By 1939 the company was running the largest steel plant in the British Empire.[1]
Tata Steel's independence from government ownership was tested twice. In 1971 the government of Indira Gandhi tried to nationalise it and failed, and in 1979 the government of Morarji Desai tried again, egged on by the industry minister George Fernandes and the steel minister Biju Patnaik, before protests by trade unions stopped the move. That the company is still privately held in 2026 is a direct result of those two failures.[1]
The modern history of the company is the history of its acquisitions. NatSteel of Singapore came first in 2004, Millennium Steel of Thailand in 2005, and then Corus in 2007 for 6.7 billion pounds, a takeover that tripled the group's profit and multiplied its revenue by five in headline terms. The global downturn of 2008 arrived almost immediately afterwards, and the European business, renamed Tata Steel Europe, lost money in almost every year that followed.[7]
The answer in the last decade has been to shrink abroad and grow at home. Port Talbot and other British assets were put up for sale in 2016, the long products business at Scunthorpe was sold in the same year, and after the Thyssenkrupp merger was blocked by European antitrust regulators in 2019 the European business was split into Dutch and British entities in October 2021. Meanwhile the company bought Bhushan Steel out of insolvency in 2018, the steel business of Usha Martin in 2019 and Neelachal Ispat Nigam in 2022, and in 2022 merged seven group metal companies into itself.[1]
