Snaring Slym, TaMo bets on fat returns

Springing a surprise, Tata Motors, India’s biggest commercial vehicle manufacturer, on Tuesday named Karl Slym, former head of General Motors India, as its managing director.

The UK-born Slym, 50, successfully headed GM’s India operations between 2007 and 2011, and in January this year joined SAIC-GM-Wuling Automobile Co in Shanghai as executive vice-president and board member.

The Chinese company makes no-frills mini-commercial vehicles and passenger cars.

From October 1, Slym will steer TaMo’s domestic and international operations – everything except the Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) business.

That would mean, apart from India, operations in South Korea, Thailand, Spain, Indonesia and South Africa.

He is the second GM hand at the carmaking group.

The first was Carl-Peter Forster, who was heading GM’s European operations before being picked by Ratan Tata in 2010 to be the group CEO, including of JLR.

Forster is credited with turning around JLR before exiting last year due to personal reasons.

A source familiar with the development said Slym, too, is Tata’s pick since the outgoing chairman wanted someone adept at local marketing and international markets.

“That was the reason why he had got Forster on board, too,” this source said.

Cyrus Mistry, deputy chairman, Tata Sons, will slip into Tata’s shoes in December this year.

Tata has often said his pet project, the Nano, is a marketing failure.

Industry experts said Slym is a consummate marketing man – so much so, he himself appeared in GM advertisements, assuring buyers of the “Chevrolet promise”, hand on his chest.

There’s the pedigree too:  a production engineer who was awarded Sloan Fellowship by GM, and an alumnus of Stanford Business School, Slym has worked with Toyota, Suzuki (through a Canadian joint venture), and was director of manufacturing at Opel in Poland.

“Slym understands the domestic market. He steered the Chevrolet Cruze launch, which became the market leader in the segment,” said VG Ramakrishnan, director with Frost & Sullivan, the consultant.

“Tata Motors is working on new range of products for domestic as well as international markets. That’s why they went for an MD with a similar background,” he said.

Slym comes in at a time when sales of Tata Motors, especially at the passenger car division, are under stress.

Despite having a strong portfolio of diesel vehicles, TaMo hasn’t been able to generate volumes. On the other hand, competition in the bread-and-butter commercial vehicle space is intensifying.

“The company will need to address the marketplace more effectively with its existing and future products in order to regain the level of market share that it earlier enjoyed,” Tata said in the company’s annual report released last week.

But an analyst with a domestic brokerage, who covers the company but does not want to be named, said he is not sure if having an expat is the right decision.

“If they wanted an expat, TaMo should have focused on having someone to replace Carl-Peter Forster, who was successful in turning around the loss-making operations of  JLR,” this person said.