Karl Jonathon Slym (9 February 1962 – 26 January 2014) was an English businessman and the managing director ofTata Motors from October 2012 until his death in 2014.[1][2] Slym was born inDerby,England. Before joiningTata Motors, Slym was the executive vice president of SGMW Motors, China, and president, managing director and board member ofGeneral Motors in India between 2007 and 2011. He was an alumnus ofStanford University and aSloan Fellow.[3]
He studiedProduction Engineering at the University of Derby and became an early employee ofToyota at its factory at nearbyBurnaston, where he rose to be a general assembly manager before moving to General Motors in 1995.
For GM, Slym worked first in the former East Germany as a "lean manufacturing" adviser in theOpel factory atEisenach inThuringia — which had previously built theWartburg saloon, the so-called "Mercedes of the East". From there he transferred toPoland as director of manufacturing at a new Opel plant inGliwice, and in 1999 he moved again, toCanada, to become manager of a GM plant at Oshawa inOntario.
After his MS at Stanford University inCalifornia in 2002, returned to Canada, then did a stint inSouth Korea before being appointed in 2007 to be general manager of GM in India, where the US giant had previously achieved only modest market penetration.
Before being headhunted by Tata Motors, Slym spent nine months as executive vice president of SGMW Motors, a GM joint venture building small commercial vehicles atLiuzhou in south westernChina.[4]
Slym, who was originally from Derby, met his future wife, Sally, when he crashed his car at the age of 19 and she handled his insurance claim. Sally Slym née Eames worked in theinsurance industry in England, heading thehuman resources department of the AA's retail insurance division. While living abroad with her husband, she taught business English to foreign executives. They married in September 1984. The couple did not have children and celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary in 2009 by visiting the Indonesian island ofLombok, where Slym, a keen scuba diver, placed a giant concrete heart in a reclaimedcoral reef to commemorate the occasion.
Karl Slym was a keen sportsman in his youth — an oarsman,rugby player andgoalkeeper — and a lifelong fan of Derby County. He described himself on hisTwitter profile as a "Britisher who just can’t stay away from India".
His elder brother Kevin died in 2008.[5]
Slym died on 26 January 2014 inBangkok,Thailand.[6] He fell from the 22nd floor to the 4th floor of theShangri-La Hotel in Bangkok where he was to attend a meeting of Tata Motors Thailand.[7]
According toRoyal Thai Police Lieutenant-Colonel Somyot Boonyakaew, "he had to make an effort to get through" a "very small window" making it impossible to drop accidentally.
As of March 2014, the investigation continues.[8]