Noel Tata back at Trent

Noel Tata has returned to the Tata retail venture Trent as additional director. He was earlier

managing director of Trent, which he stepped down from on August 12 in view of his appointment as the managing director of Tata International. He grew the retail business more than 10-fold in less than a decade. Tata International is a leather and engineering trading company with a presence in 10 African nations, a region where it wants to double revenues to $1 billion in two years. The role of the 53-year-old Noel Tata just got bigger in India’s biggest conglomerate on the 106th birth anniversary of JRD Tata.

The latest appointment may be to expose him to diverse businesses after the success he made out of Trent, which was just a shell company. While Tatas are a household name in India, its increasing revenues from overseas markets and high profile acquisitions such as Jaguar-Land Rover are yet to give it a kind of an international profile commensurate with its size.