Jaguar is a brand of Tata Motors.

104 years, four owners since 1980

The year is coloured by whoever held it at the time.

1. 1922 The business that became Jaguar began in September 1922, when William Lyons and William Walmsley formed the Swallow Sidecar Company in Blackpool on a bank overdraft of a thousand pounds. Sidecars gave way to car bodies and then to cars; the first Jaguar-badged car appeared in 1935 and the company itself took the Jaguar name in 1945.
2. 1984 Jaguar was floated out of the state-owned BL in August 1984, the first of the group's car marques to be privatised. Norman Tebbit announced on 22 May 1984 that the whole of Jaguar's share capital would be sold to investors on the stock market; the offer, priced on 25 July at a value of 297 million pounds, closed on 3 August, and the minister told the Commons on 1 August that the disposal had been "approved at an extraordinary general meeting of BL shareholders" and that "dealings in Jaguar shares will commence late next week". The buyers were the public, so there is no counterparty to name; the Government kept a golden share that capped any single holding until it gave it up for Ford's takeover in 1989.
3. 1989 Ford bought Jaguar in 1989, ending sixty-seven years in which the marque had answered to nobody in Detroit. Jaguar plc's board agreed a 2.5 billion dollar cash offer on 2 November 1989, at 13.345 dollars a share, ending a bidding contest with General Motors that had begun when Ford said in September it would seek a 15 per cent stake; Ford already held about 13 per cent. The offer was only possible because the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, Nicholas Ridley, agreed two days earlier to give up the government's golden share, which capped foreign holdings at 15 per cent, five years before it was due to expire - a decision the House of Commons was still arguing about on 6 December 1989, by which time it had, in one Member's words, "enabled that company to join forces with Ford". A year later Ford's own fuel-economy compliance manager described the deal as having happened "in late 1989". There is no counterparty to name because there was none: Jaguar plc was a listed company after its 1984 privatisation and Ford bought it from a dispersed market of shareholders under a public takeover offer.
4. 2008 Ford sold Jaguar to Tata Motors, completing on 2 June 2008. One sale and purchase agreement, signed on 25 March 2008 and announced the next day, covered both Jaguar and Land Rover - brands, plants and intellectual property - for 2.3 billion dollars in cash, with Ford putting about 600 million dollars into the two marques' pension plans. The company that took the marque was JaguarLandRover Limited, the shelf company Tata Motors had bought that January and renamed for the purpose, which is today Jaguar Land Rover Automotive plc; Tata Motors' own filing says the acquisition was made "through JaguarLandRover Limited, a wholly-owned subsidiary of TML Holdings Pte Ltd, Singapore, which is our 100% subsidiary". Jaguar Land Rover has held the marque ever since, with Tata Motors above it.