Americans are used to foreign cars — nearly half of us, after all, drive on — but no American has yet seen a vehicle bearing the brand name Tata Motors tooling along the highway. So when, a few weeks ago, news broke that this same Tata Motors, an Indian auto company, was close to buying Jaguar and Land Rover, the first reaction of many was “Who?” The implausibility of the bid was magnified when Tata rolled out its newest product, a tiny, stripped-down car that will sell for a mere twenty-five hundred dollars. The spectacle of a low-end specialist trying to buy a couple of established luxury brands looked to some like a cubic-zirconium peddler making a play for Tiffany.

There’s no denying the audacity of Tata’s bid — the company has never sold a car in the US — but there’s also no denying Tata’s distinguished pedigree.... Today, Tata is a huge conglomerate — ninety-eight companies producing everything from tea to steel and solar power — with annual revenues of around thirty billion dollars and a chairman whom Fortune recently named one of the twenty-five most powerful people in business.

If Tata is so powerful, why have so few Americans heard of it? In large part, because so much of its fortune has been made selling to its home market and to other developing countries, rather than to the US and Europe. Historically, developing-country firms that have become global power houses — like Japanese companies decades ago or, more recently, Korean companies like Samsung — were companies that, in addition to dominating their domestic markets, were heavily oriented toward exports to the West. Tata-with some exceptions, such as its steel and consulting businesses — has taken a very different approach, becoming tremendously rich while selling to people who are still pretty poor... As the business professor C.K. Prahalad argues in his book “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid,” even the poor in these countries constitute a market worth trillions of dollars. Twenty years ago, few people in India could have afforded even a twenty-five-hundred-dollar car. Today, tens of millions can...

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