Three top Tata Motors executives quit even as Pareek scripts shift

New Delhi: Three executives have quit Tata Motors Ltd’s passenger vehicles unit, which under its president Mayank Pareek is trying to engineer a turnaround in the Indian market, where the automobile maker’s market share has halved in four years.

Virat Khullar, who was in charge of product marketing at Tata Motors, left in April and has joined Renault India Pvt. Ltd as head of marketing.

Vijaya Rajalakshmi, who was brought on board in August as chief of customer experience, quit in March, according to two people familiar with the development.

Ranjit Yadav, who joined as president of the passenger vehicles unit in 2012 and was later made head of international business after the company hired Pareek in September 2014 to head the domestic unit, left the company on 28 April, the people said, on condition of anonymity.

“We have not seen any significant senior-level exits except for Mr Ranjit Yadav. A couple of mid-level exits as referenced by you is fairly routine for most large companies the size of Tata Motors,” a spokesperson for the company said in response to emailed questions from Mint.

This is the second round of executive exits in less than a year, after Venkatram Mamillapalle, head of purchases; Rajesh Bagga, head of human resources and legal; and Ankush Arora, senior vice-president (commercial-passenger vehicle business) left the firm in July 2014, two months before Pareek came on board.

Yadav, Arora and Mamillapalle were hired by the late managing director Karl Slym, who died in January 2014 in a Bangkok hotel in a suspected case of suicide. Slym’s death, a week before Tata Motors was due to showcase a new range of products at the Delhi Auto Expo, was a setback for the auto maker, which hired Pareek later from Maruti Suzuki India Ltd.

A consultant called the exodus a routine norm amid a leadership change at the top.

“Mayank has been chosen to do the job by Cyrus (Tata group chairman Cyrus Mistry) and he should not get distracted by top-level politics,” Deepesh Rathore, co-founder and director of Emerging Markets Automotive Advisors (EMAA), said in an interview from London, where he is setting up the firm’s new office.

Pareek did not respond to phone calls seeking a comment for this story.

Sales of Tata Motors have suffered in the past four years as the company invested more time to script a turnaround of Jaguar-Land Rover globally and sell the Nano small car, which flopped in India.

Between 2010-11 and 2014-15, the company’s market share in the passenger vehicle market more than halved from 13.97% to 6.22%. During the period, the passenger vehicle industry expanded from 2.5 million units to 2.6 million units.