Biography | PB Balaji — Tata Motors Made Him Group CFO From This House

On 14 August 2017 Hindustan Unilever told the exchanges that P. B. Balaji had resigned as executive director, finance and IT, and as CFO.

The same day Tata Motors said it had appointed him group chief financial officer, to take charge in November.

He was forty-six.

He had been at Unilever since May 1993, when he joined as a management trainee, a date that comes from HUL's 2014 notice to shareholders rather than from later Tata summaries that sometimes print 1995.

From 1 July 2014 he had sat on the HUL board as finance chief.

Natarajan Chandrasekaran, then already steering Tata Sons, was the person who recruited him across.

Bombay House, at 24 Homi Mody Street, is where that appointment landed.

George Wittet designed the four-storey Malad-stone building for Sir Dorabji Tata.

It opened in 1924 and has been the Tata Group head office ever since.

Tata Motors listed the same address as its principal executive office in its U.S. filings.

The job was not a ceremonial finance title.

Tata Motors said his mandate was financial performance and tighter investment decisions across the group's auto entities, including Jaguar Land Rover, which Tata had bought in 2008.

He replaced C. Ramakrishnan, whose term ended on 30 September 2017.

He stayed in the role for eight years.

In that stretch Tata Motors reported its highest-ever revenue of about 4.38 trillion rupees in 2024-25 and described itself as net-debt-free, figures carried in contemporaneous business reporting of his record as CFO.

On 17 November 2025 he left the group CFO seat to become chief executive of Jaguar Land Rover.

The stone corner on Homi Mody Street is still the public face of that chapter.

Photo: AroundTheGlobe, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons