Tata Needs a New Cash Cow

India's Tata Group badly needs to find a new cash machine. The aviation-to-autos and salt-to-steel conglomerate's existing ATM is Tata Consultancy Services, the nation's largest software exporter. The code-writing company rakes in more than 180 billion rupees ($2.7 billion) of annual free cash flow, which more than compensates for the 80 billion rupees of cash drain from the group's other 10 largest publicly traded firms.

That's a risky dependence. The legacy business of helping global companies customize and deploy large-scale enterprise software products built by the likes of Oracle and SAP is fading. Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Anurag Rana anticipates a price war in 2016. Cloud-based applications are gaining ground, but it's unclear if Indian vendors' low-cost delivery model will give them a winning edge in emerging digital technologies, too.