Tata Motors taps CFO Balaji to lead Jaguar Land Rover from November

Tata Motors said late on Monday that it has appointed PB Balaji, currently the CFO of Tata Motors, as the CEO of its luxury carmaker brand Jaguar Land Rover (JLR). Balaji will succeed Adrian Mardell, who will be stepping down after serving as CEO for three years and retiring from the company after more than three decades with the British-origin brand.

Natarajan Chandrasekaran, chairman of Jaguar Land Rover, Tata Motors, and Tata Sons, said in a statement that Balaji’s appointment will ensure the continuation of the brand’s accelerated journey to Reimagine JLR. “(Balaji) has been associated with the company for many years and is familiar with the company and its strategy and has been working with the JLR leadership team,” he added. This is the first time an Indian will lead the marquee brand since its acquisition by Tata Motors in 2008 for $2.3 billion. Balaji was appointed as CFO of Tata Motors in late 2017.

In Mardell’s time helming JLR, it eliminated £5 billion in debt, posted its highest quarterly profit in a decade, and achieved an all-time high operational performance. Mardell had joined JLR in 1990, becoming the top boss in 2022 following a brief stint as the CFO of the company.

Balaji will take charge at a time when the company has faced volatility with the imposition of reciprocal tariffs across the world by U.S. President Donald Trump. In April, JLR had stopped the export of all Britain-made vehicles to the U.S. for a month after Trump said his administration would levy a 25% tariff on all imported cars. It resumed exports in May.

Halting all exports took its toll on the quarterly results. In July, the Tata Motors-owned company said that its wholesale and retail sales fell 10.7% and 15.1% for the first quarter of fiscal year 2026, dragged down by the planned wind-down of legacy Jaguar models ahead of the launch of the new Jaguar and a pause in shipments to the U.S. during April 2025 following the introduction of U.S. import tariffs.

Balaji, as CFO of Tata Motors, had already said that the luxury carmaker currently has no plans to manufacture in the U.S., where more than a third of its vehicles are exported. “As far as manufacturing in the US is concerned, there are no such plans at this point. We need to be careful that we don’t overextend ourselves. We need to ensure that whatever is done is done for the long term and not just as a reactive mechanism for what it is today,” he said.

But perhaps the most important task he will be entrusted with is the execution of the “Reimagine” strategy, which has an ambitious aim of electrifying all its portfolio by 2030 and becoming carbon neutral across all its products, operations, and its supply chain by 2039. In September last year, JLR said that it would be investing £500 million to aid the parallel production of electric vehicles, as it doubles down on battery electric vehicles.