Global shoemaker Thomas Bata passes away at 93

02 September 2008

Mumbai: Thomas Bata, owner of the family-held global shoe giant, died in a Toronto hospital on Monday. He was 93.

A spokesman for the Toronto-based company said Bata, a great friend of India,  died at the city's Sunnybrook Hospital. He did not give the cause of death.

Thomas Bata guided the company's global operations from the 1940s to the late 1980s. Currently, his son Thomas George Bata heads the company.

The 114-year-oil company has more than 5,000 retail stores in more than 50 countries and claims to be serving a million customers globally every day. 

Bata employs over 40,000 people at its 40 production facilities in more than two dozen countries.

Thomas Bata's cobbler father, Tomas Bata Sr, started his business under the Bata name in the city of Zlin in the then Czechoslovakia in 1894. And, by the time he died in an air crash in 1932, the small shoe company had become a giant called the Bata Shoe Organisation.