Tata Motors MD sees a podium finish after growth ‘marathon’

Guenter Butschek, managing director and chief executive of homegrown auto major Tata Motors, has called upon employees to bolster accountability and drive performance within the organisation as the firm seeks to build on the positives of its turnaround drive that is expected to be completed by March.

In his New Year message to employees, Butschek said several steps had been taken in 2017 such as“accelerated efforts on sales enhancement, rigorous cost reduction have shown quick results on market share and bottom-line improvement, but the effort needs to continue .”

“Turnaround is a sprint, while we‘re running a marathon for sustainable, profitable growth of our great company! We collectively owe Tata Motors a podium finish in the market place,” he wrote.

The firm has made considerable progress and the good performances in second and third quarters were reflections of its efforts, he said adding that with structural de- bottlenecking of supply chain Tata Motors has started to build a future ready highly capable strategic supplier base.

“With all elements of OE (organisation effectiveness) finally on the right track, we need to bolster accountability levels and drive performance within the organisation,” said Butschek.

He further said, “The turnaround demonstrated the new structure’s effectiveness— speed, simplicity, agility! These are the key characteristics driving a high-performance culture.”

Last year, TataMotors had announced a turnaround plan for its domestic business, with a special focus on the ailing commercial vehicles business that lost market share, reaching 44.4 per cent in March 2017 from a high of nearly 60 per cent, five years back. In 2016-17, Tata Motors had posted a loss after tax, on a stand-alone basis, of ~24.8 billion compared to ~0.62 billion in the previous year. Its stand-alone gross revenue was ~491 billion, up 3.6 per cent from the previous year.

“While our ‘Transformation’ journey started to gain speed in 2017, we had to shift gears to turnaround with a single-minded focus on execution,” Butschek said. Both the commercial vehicles (CV) and passenger vehicles (PV) business units clocked best sales in September 2017 in the last 4-5 year period as a result of focussing energies on achieving new heights, he said.

“While we continue to scale new heights, the turnaround momentum should roll up into a sustainable ‘way of living’ at TataMotors— determining our aggression in the market place.

We need to consolidate our actions and ensure that the turnaround plan gets fully accomplished giving strong returns by March 2018,” Butschek said.

”THE TURNAROUND DEMONSTRATED THE NEW STRUCTURE’S EFFECTIVENESS - SPEED, SIMPLICITY, AGILITY! THESE ARE THE KEY CHARACTERISTICS DRIVING A HIGH-PERFORMANCE CULTURE” GUENTER BUTSCHEK Tata Motors MD and CEO