The Hindu Business Line : Tata Industries proposes to enter emerging technology areas

Hyderabad, Sept. 1 Tata Industries Ltd is firming up plans to enter emerging technology areas, which offer scalability and business opportunity in a big way with significant investments.

Alternate energy, drug discovery, medical diagnostics, water technologies are some of the areas, where considerable progress has been achieved to diversify, said Mr K.A. Chaukar, Managing Director.

“We want to fund promising ventures and unlike venture capitalists who want to exit, we want to stay and grow the venture into a profitable business or technology. The scale of investment can vary from Rs 60 lakhs to Rs 50 crores,” he said.

Tata Industries is open to raising funds through rights issue for investing in these newer areas. For example in the drug discovery, contract research (Advinus and Indigene), the company has already invested nearly Rs 70-80 crores, Mr Chaukar told newspersons in an informal interaction.

Tata Industries is now a ‘zero debt’ company, having cleared up the Rs 1,600-crore it had borrowed three years ago. It also has $350 million ready for investments in new ventures globally, he said.

Giving a snapshot of the Tata Group’s forays into defence, nuclear, space, biotech, automobiles etc, Mr Chaukar said a flexible solar cell with technology from Switzerland and a diagnostic tool from US, were promising investment initiatives. Similarly, in India new molecule development in the field of metabolic disorders (such as diabetes) was promising. A prototype unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) developed by students of the IIT (Kharagpur) is likely to get up to Rs 5-crore funding, after it has shown big promise, Mr Chaukar added.

He said what the Tatas would not get into were tobacco, alcohol, movies, guns etc. but, it was open to revisit some of the areas it had exited, if there was potential.

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