Telco Internationalization Strategy

Internationalization of TATA

TATA’s decision of entering the commercial vehicle market via a joint venture with Dailmer-Banz of Germany in 1945 can be considered as its first step towards globalization. This deal helped them at getting better in their engineering competencies and to develop excellent standards in quality and processes. Though Telco began to internationalize its business more rapidly post 1991. They however considered it as a de-risking strategy, since they wanted to diversify their portfolio and not keep all their eggs in one basket. The various ways through which the company internationalized its operations were through exporting, Acquisitions, JVs and setting up manufacturing and marketing units in foreign land.

In the initial stages, the company was following an international strategy

For example, they observed that around 2001 in China there was a 56% growth in the demand of passenger cars and the commercial vehicle segment was growing at 210% each year. Applying the CAGE framework on China we see that they were also an emerging economy like us and thus closer to India on that parameter, also they were geographically closer to us, though there were clear differences in the culture and the administrative set up since there central control was in the hands of a communist government. To exploit the above mentioned factors under the constraints highlighted by the CAGE framework, Telco decided to grow in China by making a strategic process for growth, named the Strategic Ladder (SL), which was further divided into SL turnaround (focused on improving internal efficiencies as the prime motive) and SL growth phase (leveraging internal strength for profitable growth as the main