He told the nominee directors of the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust on August 12 2026 that he would step away when his current term ends on February 20 2027.

In his letter, he noted that the proposal to extend his term had been pending for six months and was not carried through because one board member did not support it.

The timing was pointed. The announcement landed less than a week before the holding company’s annual general meeting on August 18. Group stocks fell as much as 4%, with TCS, the company Chandra himself once ran, the heaviest loser.

The Sir Dorabji Tata Trust said it respected his decision, then moved to constitute a selection committee under Article 118 of the Tata Sons articles of association.

The six-month stalemate
The dissenting board member has not been officially named, but the reporting points one way. Noel Tata, chairman of Tata Trusts, which controls roughly 66% of Tata Sons, wanted three things before signing off.

A credible turnaround plan for the loss-making new businesses. Clarity on how much more capital those businesses would swallow. And a written assurance that Tata Sons would not be taken public.

ALSO READ | Business Leader of the Week: Air India bets on Tewolde Gebremariam to engineer a turnaround

There was a second, quieter argument about the term itself. Chandra is 63 and the group’s retirement age for executive roles is 65, so the Trusts were reportedly comfortable with two more years rather than five.

What began as a scheduling question hardened into a referendum on nearly a decade of capital allocation.

The numbers behind the row
Tata Sons’ latest annual report gave Noel Tata his ammunition. For the year to March 2026, consolidated net profit fell 35% to about 266 billion rupees, roughly USD 2.78 billion, even as consolidated revenue rose 17% to 6.61 trillion rupees.

The standalone picture was healthier, with net profit up nearly 22%, but dividend income from TCS fell 12.7%, a reminder of how much of the empire still rests on one company.

Nearly all the damage came from unlisted arms. Air India and Air India Express together lost 22,238 crore rupees, more than double the 10,859 crore they lost a year earlier, on combined revenue that fell nearly 9%.

Tata Digital lost 4,974 crore rupees and battery venture Agratas 1,101 crore. Tata Projects, Tata Play and Tata Realty and Infrastructure added several hundred crore each.

The listed side offered no cover. Market capitalisation across the group’s quoted companies fell about 12% over the year, driven by a sharp derating of TCS.

What actually went wrong
None of the big losses were mysteries, and few were purely self-inflicted. Air India was rebuilding a state carrier from a standing start, then absorbed the crash of AI171 in June 2025, airspace closures, fuel price spikes from the West Asia conflict and adverse currency moves.

Chandrasekaran has told its shareholders the turnaround is a five to ten year job, not a quarterly one.

Jaguar Land Rover, historically the profit engine at Tata Motors, lost five weeks of production to a cyberattack that shut its plants from early September 2025, and finished the year with revenue down 20.9% to GBP 22.9 billion, compounded by US tariffs, weak Chinese demand and the phase-out of legacy Jaguar models ahead of an all-electric relaunch.

Tata Digital’s losses were the cost of buying market share against better funded rivals. Tata Electronics is a different sort of loss. Its revenue roughly doubled to 1.31 trillion rupees, making it the group’s fourth-largest company by turnover, and it broke even at the operating line. What sits below that line is the cost of building a semiconductor industry from scratch.

The Chandra record
He took charge on 21 February 2017, the first non-Parsi and the first career executive to lead Tata Sons, inheriting a group in open civil war. What followed was a decade of consolidation and expansion.

He reorganised around 30 group companies into ten verticals under a One Tata banner of simplification, synergy and scale, bought Bhushan Steel out of insolvency in 2018 and Neelachal Ispat in 2022, took Air India back from the government, acquired BigBasket and 1mg, listed Tata Technologies in 2023 and Tata Capital in October 2025 in the group’s largest ever IPO, and split Tata Motors in two.

The scoreboard is good and mixed at the same time. Group revenue nearly doubled and profit rose several times over.

Combined market value of listed companies climbed from about 8.2 lakh crore rupees to well over 23 lakh crore.

Yet compounded at roughly 12.4% a year, that trails the Nifty 50 over the same stretch. The best performer was Trent, a business Noel Tata built. The worst was TCS.

The chip and iPhone question
Chandra’s boldest wager was electronics. Tata bought Wistron’s iPhone plant in Karnataka in 2023, expanded at Hosur, and made itself central to Apple’s shift away from China at a moment when India assembles most of the iPhones sold in the United States.

On top of that he committed roughly USD 14 billion to semiconductors, a 91,000 crore rupee fabrication plant at Dholera with Taiwan’s PSMC, targeting 50,000 wafers a month at 28 to 110 nanometres, and a 27,000 crore rupee assembly and test facility in Assam.

Construction at Dholera passed the halfway mark in April 2026, with trial production targeted for the end of this year.

These projects are the reason his exit matters beyond Bombay House. A fab loses money for its first several years by design, and India’s semiconductor mission has no comparable private anchor.

A successor under pressure to restore profitability could slow the ramp, seek partners to share the burden, or push harder for state support.

Outright abandonment is unlikely given the sunk cost and the political weight behind the projects, but the pace and the appetite for the next tranche of capital are now uncertain.

TCS in the age of AI
The crown jewel has been the most disrupted asset in the portfolio. TCS closed March 2026 with 584,519 employees, down 23,460 in a year, after announcing cuts of about 2% of its workforce concentrated in middle and senior management.

Rupee revenue still grew 4.6% and operating margin reached a four-year high of 25 per cent, but in constant currency the top line shrank 2.4%.

Fewer people, flat dollars and fatter margins break the equation Indian IT was built on, that revenue equals people multiplied by hours multiplied by rate.

Chief executive K Krithivasan has been unusually candid, telling staff to pass AI productivity gains on to clients even where that cannibalises billing. Annualised AI revenue crossed USD 2.3 billion by the March quarter, real but small against a USD 30 billion base.

Whether a new chairman accelerates a shift to products, outcome-based pricing and genuine AI-first delivery, or simply defends margins, is the largest question hanging over the group’s valuation.

The succession shadow
Tata has done this badly before. Cyrus Mistry was removed in October 2016, reinstated by an appellate tribunal in 2019, and the matter was settled only when the Supreme Court found for Tata Sons in 2021, costing the group four years of distraction.

This time the process is orderly, the runway is seven months, and names such as T V Narendran, Saurabh Agrawal and Shailesh Chandra are already circulating.

What has not changed is the tension between a philanthropic majority owner and a management team that wants to spend.

The listing question
That tension has a name, and it is the IPO. The Reserve Bank classified Tata Sons as an upper layer non-banking financial company in 2022, which ordinarily forces a listing.

Tata Sons repaid more than 21,000 crore rupees of debt and applied to be deregistered as a core investment company. In August 2026 the RBI kept it on the list, saying the application remains under examination.

The case for listing is transparency and access to capital for exactly the sort of long-gestation bets that just cost Chandra his job.

The case against is control, since the Trusts fear dilution of a structure that funnels dividends into philanthropy, and market pressure on projects that need a decade.

Shapoorji Pallonji, holding about 18% and under debt strain, wants the exit that only a listing provides.

Chandra leaves in February with the group larger, more diversified and more exposed than he found it. The argument he lost was never really about whether the bets were right. It was about who gets to keep paying for them.

Image Courtesy: Tata Consumer Products

The post N Chandrasekaran built Tata Sons’ biggest bets. Who pays for them now? appeared first on International Finance.

According to The Verge, the tech giant has debated adding health-related functions to its AirPods for years.

According to Mark Gurman of Bloomberg, this is now finally taking place.

In the next year or two, the iPhone manufacturer “may improve the AirPods to become a health tool,” and they “could even come with the capacity to receive hearing data of some form,” Mark Gurman claims.

It was revealed in 2020 that the tech giant intended to include ambient light sensors in the subsequent iterations of the AirPods to track information like blood oxygen saturation and pulse rate.

Another rumour from later in 2021 stated that the business was looking towards new health-related capabilities for its AirPods.

Nevertheless, in 2023 January, analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said that the tech giant will begin shipping new AirPods Max, which might cost USD 99, in the second half of 2019 or the first part of 2025.

Meanwhile, photos from a Twitter account named MrWhite128 reportedly showed ribbon cables that look like they’d fit perfectly in a set of eye-shaped goggles, thus giving rise to chats that the tech community might have just witnessed the looks of cables and sensors for Apple’s upcoming and much-rumoured virtual/ augmented reality headset.

The account also shared pictures of a cable that has three bulbous sections, which, for The Verge, could be some sort of sensor/camera array. The headset is rumoured to have colour-passthrough capabilities that let the users see the real world outside of it, similar to the Meta Quest.

There are rumours that Apple may announce the launch of the interactive headset at the 2023 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) and release it before the end of the year.

These developments come at a time when the tech giant is facing a talent exodus at the leadership level. Since the second half of 2022, Apple has lost about a dozen high-ranking executives, as per media reports.

Most of these people carried the title of vice-president, which is just below the senior vice-president level that reports to the company CEO Tim Cook. They are some of the most important figures at Apple, responsible for the daily operations of many core functions.

The departures included vice-presidents overseeing Apple’s fields like industrial design, the online store, information systems, cloud efforts, aspects of hardware and software engineering, privacy matters, sales in emerging markets, subscription services and procurement. In total, close to 12 key officials have left the company so far.

The post Health-tracking AirPods, mixed-reality headsets: Apple goes aggressive at tech front appeared first on International Finance.

As per the JD.com app and the Suning website, the basic model of the iPhone 14 Pro is currently for sale at both places for 7,199 yuan (USD 1,062). The difference between it and Apple’s regular price on its official China website is 800 Yuan.

According to Reuters’ analysis of social media ads, several other authorised Apple third-party retailers are also providing comparable savings on the iPhone 14 pro and iPhone Pro Max.

To increase demand, Apple occasionally permits its Chinese partner vendors to discount its smartphones.

Although several Android brands have also reduced costs, Jeffries analyst Edison Lee noted in a letter to clients that “the return of price cut even for the best-selling iPhone 14 models is not a good sign for demand.”

According to research firm Canalys, China’s smartphone sales in 2022 reached 286 million, the lowest level in a decade, with sales in the fourth quarter falling 14% due to weak demand.

According to Canalys, the early release of the iPhone 14 series and supply chain problems brought on by worker unrest at the facilities of contract manufacturer Foxconn were some of the reasons why Apple sales dropped 24% in the quarter.

The price reductions were initially reported by the China Securities Journal.

The news comes amid Apple and its rival Google registering lower-than-expected revenue and profits for the last three months of 2022.

Apple, the world’s biggest company in terms of market value, blamed falling sales of its flagship iPhone on production disruptions in China.

Apple’s revenue was at USD 117.1 billion for the three months that ended December 2022, down 5.4% from its 2021 figures. While the profit after tax was at USD 30 billion, both sales and revenue generation figures were below analysts’ expectations.

China is the main manufacturing centre for Apple’s iPhones and the strict curbs imposed in line with Beijing’s zero-COVID policy, which left some phone-making factories locked down, seriously affected the company’s ability to deliver exports for the major year-end holiday season.

China has now relaxed the policy but anxiety over the state of the global economy remains.

Central banks across the world have been raising interest rates to rein in inflation, while consumers are also tightening their belts as the cost of living rises and wages stagnate.

Tech companies including Google and Amazon have announced plans to fire more than 50,000 people combined recently, blaming over-hiring during the COVID pandemic when many people went online for work and entertainment.

The post Will discounted prices boost iPhone sales? China starts the experiment appeared first on International Finance.

As a result, Apple reached its highest-ever market share for smartphones in the United States. Apple credited the achievement to the iPhone’s “active installed base,” a statistic that accounts for all users who have acquired used iOS devices.

iOS (previously known as iPhone OS) never attained a market share of even half during the early years of the iPhone. At that time, manufacturers of smartphones included Blackberry, Nokia, and Motorola. By 2010, two years after its release, Android had surpassed iOS in terms of the number of installs.

Since then, the global smartphone market has been dominated by Google’s mobile operating system, which, according to Statcounter, will hold more than 70% of the market by 2022.

Google most likely has nothing to be concerned about. After all, relative to other markets, the US has always had a disproportionately large presence of the iPhone. The business is probably still attentively examining the situation.

Speaking to The Times, Counterpoint’s research director Jeff Fieldhack said, “This is a big milestone that we could see replicated in other affluent countries across the globe.”

With the iPhone accounting for 57% of all sales in the segment as of Q2 2022, Apple had already established its dominance in the premium smartphone industry.

The post Apple iPhone hits a major milestone in US smartphone market appeared first on International Finance.