British luxury carmaker Jaguar Land Rover Ltd, owned by Tata Motors Ltd, expects its China sales to grow 20% this year, Greater China head Bob Grace said on Tuesday.

The target compares with a rise of around 40% last year which Grace partly attributed to a larger base of comparison.

Tata Motors-owned Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) is working on an ambitious plan to set up a factory in the US, in a first for a British car maker in the world's second-biggest automobile market.

The west Midlands-based luxury carmaker is reportedly talking to several southern states of America, including South Carolina, about building a plant in the US, The Sunday Times claimed on Sunday.

Tata Motors gained over 2% at Rs 498 on the Bombay Stock Exchange after the automaker received an order to supply 928 Tata Marcopolo built buses to the State Transport Authorities in South India.

The order comprises 487 units bagged from Karnataka (Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation), 40 units from Puducherry (Pondicherry Road Transport Corporation), 97 from Kerala (Kerala State Road Transport Corporation) and 304 from North East Karnataka region (North Eastern Karnataka Road Transport Corporation), Tata Motors said in a press release.

Markets continued to trade flat with negativc bias weighed down by profit taking in IT majors after recent gains post upbeat earnings from Infosys and index heavyweight ITC.

At 10:30AM, the 30-share Sensex was down 42 points at 26,342 and the 50-share Nifty was down 17 points at 7,868.

Auto major Tata Motors is upbeat about the growth of compact sedan segment in Madhya Pradesh and expects the festive demand to help auto sector recover from the current slag, said officials.

Last month, the company launched its compact sedan 'Zest' which received very good response throughout the country.

At the annual shareholders' meeting of Tata Motors (then Tata Engineering and Locomotive Company, or Telco) in August 2001, Ratan Tata offered to resign from the company's chairmanship if shareholders so wished. Though Tata's offer remained just that - merely an offer - quite a few shareholders and analysts criticised the management strategy of transforming Telco into a full-fledged passenger car maker.

In July, when Tata group Chairman Cyrus Mistry identified defence & aerospace as one of the four clusters that could drive growth for the conglomerate over the next decade, he clearly had his eye on the estimated $250 billion (Rs 15 lakh crore) that the government would spend to purchase arms and equipment in this period. The other three clusters, in Mistry's view, were consumer goods, infrastructure and financial services.

Markets are trading flat in the noon trades with select metal and power stocks losing the most after the Supreme Court in its verdict today cancelled most of the coal blocks allocated. However, buying in the defensive stocks have limit losses.

At 2:38PM, the 30-share Sensex is up 27 points 26,803 and the 50-share Nifty has gained 1 point at 8,018.

Tata Motors has moved higher by 4.2% to Rs 541, also its new high on the National Stock Exchange (NSE).

The stock opened at Rs 515 and touched a low of Rs 514 in early morning deals on NSE. A combined 5.94 million shares changed hands on the counter so far on NSE and BSE.

Shares of Index heavyweight Tata Motors dipped more than 1% to Rs 506 on the BSE in the early trades after global wholesales in August 2014, including Jaguar Land Rover, stood at 73,524 units showing a declination of 10% from the corresponding month last year.

Global wholesales of all Tata Motors’ commercial vehicles and Tata Daewoo range stood at 30,536 units and passenger vehicles in August 2014 stood at 11,338 units.

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