TATA on the way to become the world's best automotive company

Implications: Thanks to its focus on Africa and other developing region TATA might be not only beneficial to its host countries but to the environment at large, too.

Analysis: TATA of India is not only a world-class steel maker and the world's second largest tea company with its Tetley's brand but above and all set on course to become one of the world's most important automotive companies.

With the launch of the low-cost Nano early 2008 TATA showed the way in the automotive industry. With its most recent venture in South Africa TATA Motors shows the way in the world's last frontier of development: the African continent. The first step is trucks and buses followed by the ingenious Nano passenger car.

I am positively convinced that TATA Motors will show the way in how to motorize the masses of the developing world without harming the environment. TATA has acquired as the only world player a license to the compressed air technology developed by the French engineer Guy Nègre within his company MDI from Luxembourg. The first mass-produced CAT engine will be in a small commercial vehicle to be launched in India by 2010. From there on, I expect this clean-tech to proliferate to other TATA countries at an ever increasing pace.

Why not launching the CAT technology first in the West? The emerging markets are hungry for individual mobility whereas we in the West tend to think in legacies and along not-invented-here lines. A commercial reality that a savvy company like TATA Motors seems to understand fully.