The appointment of Tata’s highly experienced chief financial officer, PB Balaji, to replace Adrian Mardell as CEO of JLR will always be remembered for the extraordinary intervention of US president Donald Trump.
The 47th president claimed, out of the blue and without the slightest justification for such incendiary remarks, that Mardell was leaving “in disgrace” and that Jaguar was in “absolute turmoil”.
If Balaji (pictured below), JLR’s first Indian CEO, didn’t already know he was facing a tough assignment, he certainly does now.
The sheer speed of the Balaji announcement makes it clear how anxious the Tata parent board must have been to get its hands directly on the reins of its cash-cow British subsidiary, which has recently been generating up to two-thirds of Tata’s total group revenue.
Balaji’s appointment was confirmed on Monday, just four days after Mardell’s departure announcement, even though JLR had originally intimated, with the mock calmness of routine corporate announcements, that the identity of a new CEO would be announced “in due course”. It is now perfectly clear that Tata felt there wasn’t a moment to lose.
There had already been ample warning that JLR’s recent excellent financial results were about to be torpedoed in the latest quarter by a dearth of Jaguars to sell and by the ill effects of rising US tariffs (which forced the brand to stop US exports in April amid the uncertainty). The latter looks especially serious since the Discovery and best-selling Defender are made in higher-tax Slovakia, not alongside the Range Rover in lower-tax Solihull.
It was also clear there would be no abatement in the new electric Jaguar turmoil of the past nine months, given that the Type 00 concept design was continuing to prove highly controversial and the recent news that the launch of production models would be postponed (along with that of the Range Rover Electric) because of a feared lack of demand for luxury EVs.
