It has been quite disturbing to read recent reports regarding the responses from Orient Express Hotels and Ford to overtures from the Tata group. Both these groups responded in a peculiar manner, choosing to highlight India and Indians in a “downmarket” kind of manner, rather than focussing on the merits of the Tata group.

Both seemed to feel that associating their brands with the Tata Group was going to downgrade the quality of their respective brands. In this day and age, it seems amazing that people can make derogatory remarks that are so racist in nature, especially high ranking executives.

These companies haven’t been able to keep up with the competition and are lagging badly, so it is difficult to understand their opposition to someone who is offering a helping hand to resurrect the company. Why should it matter who the owner of a company is ? Indians have shown in the past that they can manage large multinational operations of global companies, and the best part is that they do it without resorting to massive job cuts, Mittal’s takeover’s of various steel plants being a case in point.

In the case of Orient Express, the Tata company Indian Hotels recently put out statistics which showed that their Taj Group of hotels had performed much better than Orient Express.

On the other hand, Ford seemed to have climbed down from their high horse and announced that the Tata group had nosed ahead of Mahindra and Mahindra and One Equity, a private equity firm led by former Ford CEO Jacques Nasser, though a formal announcement to this effect was likely to made in the new year.

Related Posts: