India’s Tata Group Maps U.S. Expansion

European Pressphoto Agency Ratan Tata, former Tata Group chairman, left, at the India launch of Jaguar Land Rover with Phil Popham, managing director of Land Rover in Mumbai, Maharashtra on June 28, 2009.

NEW YORKâ€" Tata Group, the Indian conglomerate whose name is associated with one of the biggest outsourcing firms in the world, is bringing its more of its business to United States.

Already the largest Indian-owned business in the country by revenue, with more than 24,000 employees working for 11 companies, Tata is positioning itself to become a household name in the United States, said Kapil Sharma, 41, the senior North America general manager of Tata Sons, the Indian conglomerate’s holding company.

This year, he said, Tata plans to hire thousands more, increase awareness of American brands like the once-popular Eight O’Clock Coffee and strengthen its ties with government officials.

“When people think of India and business with the U.S., outsourcing most commonly comes to mind,” said Mr. Sharma over lunch earlier this year at the Pierre Hotel, part of the Tata-owned Taj Hotels Resorts and Palaces. “Here, it’s the other way around, and the U.S. is becoming more and more important to the company.”

Mr. Sharma said the reason for Tata’s increasing foothold in the United States is simple: “There are lots of chances for Tata to be profitable in the U.S.,” he said.

Tata was founded in 1868 by Jamsetji Tata as a trading company and has grown into a giant in the steel, hotels and auto industry, with 450,000 global employees, up from 200,000 employees in 2003. The group recently named Cyrus P. Mistry of Ireland as its sixth chairman, the first outside the Tata family.

Sam Panthaky/Agence France-Presse â€" Getty Images Tata Group Chairman Cyrus Mistry at the Vibrant Gujarat Summit in Ahmedabad on Jan. 12.

Tata’s expansion in the United States has been accompanied by expansion around the world, part of a drive started in 2000 by the former chairman Ratan Tata. Although only 25 percent of the company’s employees are outside India, 58 percent of its revenues are generated in the other nearly 80 countries where it does business.

Tata’s United States portfolio generated $8 billion in revenue in 2011, Mr. Sharma said, which is small compared to the company’s overall annual revenue of $100 billion in the last fiscal year.

Still, Mr. Sharma said the company’s American investments are highly valued. “The talent available and innovations in the U.S. are a big factor in our growth here,” he said. “We feel that we can marry those two with the Tata name to create success.”

Mr. Sharma said that Tata’s ties to the United States go back to 1945, roughly two months after the end of World War II, when the company opened a trading office in Manhattan. The company has expanded to include consumer brands like Tetley, Eight O’Clock Coffee, Jaguar Land Rover, a vitamin beverage called Activate and Tata Chemicals, which mines soda ash.

Tetley Tea, via Pr Newswire

A big priority for Tata is a substantial expansion of Eight O’Clock Coffee in the United States and Canada by revamping the brand to be more accessible through the introduction of products like K-cups, which are individual portions of coffee that are used with Keurig machines.

Mr. Sharma, who was once the senior counsel for former Democratic Senator Robert G. Torricelli of New Jersey, is also trying to strengthen the company’s relationship with prominent politicians. Already, he said, he has a friendly relationship with South Carolina’s Republican governor, Nikki R. Haley, and Tata was one of the sponsors of a reception at the National Governors Association in February.

Mr. Sharma said he enlisted 15 employees to attend the reception and mingle with the politicians. “Governors understand foreign investment and what it can bring to their community,” he said.

Despite Mr. Sharma’s efforts to move the company beyond outsourcing, Tata’s main business in the United States right now is its information technology company, Tata Consulting Services, or T.C.S., which has 20,000 employees and 18 offices. T.C.S. recently opened new service centers in Santa Clara, Calif., and Minneapolis and is in the process of hiring 2,000 more consultants in the United States. T.C.S.’s revenue from North America has almost quadrupled to more than $5 billion a year in the five years to March 2012.

Mr. Sharma said the demand for an expanded workforce is coming from an increasing number of new clients, as well as more projects from existing clients, which include Microsoft, Cisco and Chrysler.

TCS is growing faster in the United States than its Indian rivals like Infosys, said Arup Roy, a research director at Gartner who is based in Mumbai. Mr. Roy cites several reasons for Tata’s edge, including consistent quality, client satisfaction, breadth of offerings, continuous improvement programs and a huge brand awareness among large clients in the United States.

Tata’s biggest push after T.C.S. is consumer products, most notably Jaguar Land Rover and Tetley, but Arvind Panagariya, a professor of economics and Indian political economy at Columbia University, said that compared to established American brands, its presence in the market is still small. “You can’t compare Jaguar Land Rover with a Ford or Tetley with, say, a Lipton,” he said.

Still, both companies have grown since Tata came into the picture. Since Tata bought Tetley in 2000 and Jaguar Land Rover in 2008, sales at both companies have picked up in the United States, Mr. Sharma said. Jaguar Land Rover, for example, sold 287,000 vehicles in 2007 while still owned by Ford, but last year the automaker sold a record 357,773 vehicles, which is a 30 percent increase from 2011.

Not all of Tata’s American ventures have been successful. The company owned a series of four-star hotels in the mid-1990s, including the Lexington in New York City, said Alan Rosling, who was the executive director of the board of Tata Sons for five years before he left in 2009.

“The properties Tata was behind didn’t work with the rest of the portfolio,” he said, which was focused on high-end hotels. So Tata exited the United States hotel business in the late 1990s.

Jennifer S. Altman for The New York Times The penthouse apartment at the Pierre Hotel in Manhattan, New York.

In 2005, Tata got back into the American hotel market, this time by adding five-star hotels, including the Pierre in New York and Taj Boston, to the Taj portfolio.

Tata’s expanding presence in the United States is part of the wave of Indian investment in the last five years, which also includes companies like Mahindra, Wipro and Jindal Steel.

According to data from the United States Bureau of Economic Analysis, India ranked fourth in its growth rate of foreign direct investment in the United States from 2006 to 2011 (Israel, China and New Zealand are the top three). India’s financial interests in the United States rose 40.8 percent in that period, with a total spending of $9.8 billion.

Though the flow of foreign direct investments from India to the United States has recently dropped, Professor Panagariya said that fluctuations are normal because India is still a rising nation.

Given Tata’s number of acquisitions in the last decade, snapping up more companies in the United States might seem the obvious strategy, but Mr. Sharma said that is not the case.

“At this point, it’s not about buying more companies,” he said. “We want to focus on the companies we have and educate the U.S. about who we are.”