Era of uncertainty carries big strategic opportunities: Tata Group Chairman

Recovering from a deadly plane crash involving Air India flight 171 at Ahmedabad and a major cybersecurity attack at its Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) during 2025, the Tata Group is looking at future with optimism and coming years could turn most successful in its long history.

“For India and the Tata group this era of uncertainty carries with it big strategic opportunities. Realignments create openings for youthful dynamic economies like ours. For our group the coming years can be the most successful in our long history,” Tata Sons Chairman N. Chandrasekaran wrote in a letter to the Group’s employees on the New Year eve.

Thanking the employees for coming together to handle the plane crash crisis he said in a year full of difficult moments the devastating wrought by the crash of AI171 affected all in the group. 

Stating that while technology has many benefits, he said it has potential to create significant vulnerabilities for large corporations. 

“JLR’s cybersecurity attack this autumn emphasized that while growth is a focus, resilience has to be a long term theme whether it is from a value chain point of view or from a technological angle. With heightened vulnerabilities the question is not simply whether shocks will happen, it is also about how well we can recover from shocks,” he emphasized. 

He said having built 10 new factories in the past year, the group was building six more, including a semiconductor fab in Dholera and gigafactories in Sanand, Gujarat, and in Somerset, UK. 

“All of our new factories are designed to be Al-first, which should drive better output quality and productivity,” he said.

Stating that 2026 could be another year of uncertainty, he said employees should focus on execution by setting targets and meeting them. “This will be vital for all our companies in 2026,” he said.

Emphasizing on the importance of teamwork he said a group of skilled people working together could achieve far more than a solitary genius working alone.

He urged the staff to take risk. “When volatility is constant, caution can be tempting. But half-measures rarely succeed in times like these. Boldness, meanwhile, has outsized payoffs,” he said.

“Let’s lift our sights to what will matter most in the years and decades ahead. And let’s be willing to invest in brilliant research and scholarship, even when it takes time to bear fruit,” he concluded.