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.

Thomas Bata Jr, who took over the company, had to abandon business and flee to Canada in 1938 under the Nazi onslaught. And, when he returned to Czechoslovakia after its liberation in 1945, the communists had already taken over the Bata Shoe Company.

Back in Canada, Thomas Bata made Bata Shoe Company all over again and made it a global name.

The Czechoslovak governmenta invited Bata back to his native country after the fall of communism in 1989, but he refused. In 1991, he was given the top Czech award, the Tomas Garrigue Masaryk Order.

Paying tributes to him, the current Czech Republic president Vaclav Klaus said Bata was ''one of the greatest personalities of our time.''

''Despite ill fortune in his homeland, he managed to succeed in the world and became for us a symbol of business success. We will all miss him.''

'''In Thomas Tata's death, India has lost a great friend. He wanted more and more Canadian groups to do business with India, and that's why he formed set up the C-IBC,'' Kam Rathee, president of the Canada-India Business Council (C-IBC) which Bata formed 26 years ago, said.

Bata also served as chairman emeritus of the C-IBC which conferred its Lifetime Achievement Award on him last year.

Almost every continent sports a plant and stores of the company whose stated objective is to put a pair of shoes on every pair of feet.

Bata, a supporter of free trade, and democracy, had also served as chairman of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's business and advisory committee on non-members.

Bata India has been in India since 1931 and become a known name in footwear. It is also into real estate business and is doing pretty well in it, said Rathee.  Mr Bata used to visit India five to six times a year.

Bata is survived by his wife Sonja, a son and three daughters. Sonja has been instrumental in setting up the monumental Bata Shoe Museum here. It traces the 4,500-year-old history of shoe wearing.

The Bata museum features some breathtaking items such as the diamond-studded slippers of Nizam of Hyderabad, worth $140,000, and pony-skin boots of Picasso.