Drivers of a successful acquisition: a study on Jaguar Land Rover acquisition by Tata

Jaguar and Land Rover are two British premium automobile brands that were acquired by Indian car maker Tata Motors from Ford in the year 2008 for $2.3 billion. Literatures, in the past, have discussed several mergers and acquisition cases from the automobile industry. Although, being one of the largest & successful acquisitions in the industry, this acquisition has not received scholarly attention. What make the acquisition more interesting is the fact that Tata being an Indian low-cost car manufacturer attains success in handling a premiere brands like Jaguar Land Rover, while Ford in spite of its huge experience and size in the industry, failed to live up to the expectation. Since the acquisition has taken place, sales and profits of Jaguar Land Rover have seen a tremendous growth. In 2014, financial experts estimated that the valuation of Jaguar Land Rover increased from $2.3 billion to $14 billion in just 5 years. This paper aims to identify the various factors behind Tata-Jaguar Land Rover’s success story by comparing the post-acquisition strategies adopted by the two owners, Ford and Tata. This paper uses qualitative study primarily based on interviews with top management portfolio holders from Ford, Jaguar Land Rover and Tata as well as industry experts to study the differences in post-acquisition strategies adopted by the two owners. The preliminary findings show that separation strategy, market expansion and increased R&D investments are the major drivers behind the success of the Tata’s acquisition. Time of Jaguar Land Rover has come out as a surprising success factor in this research. The study reveals that Ford used organizational integration strategies, which limited the quality of decision making of Jaguar Land Rover management team. On the other hand, Tata has implemented “Separation strategy” and empowered decentralized decision making to Jaguar Land Rover’s managers. This study also brings out a comparison of level of task integration between Jaguar Land Rover and its owners with the help of patent analysis.