India's Tata Motors profits slump on weak China sales

India's largest car maker Tata Motors reported a near 50 percent dive in quarterly profits on Friday due to a slump in sales of its luxury British unit in China.

Consolidated net profit for the three months to June fell to 27.69 billion rupees ($432.66 million) from 53.98 billion rupees a year ago, a drop of 48.70 percent, the Mumbai-based company said.

That was well below the expectations of analysts surveyed by Bloomberg who had predicted that the firm, part of Tata's sprawling tea-to-steel conglomerate, would report profits of 31.4 billion rupees.

It marked the company's second consecutive large fall in quarterly profits following a 56 percent slump announced in May.

The latest fall was "primarily driven by weak China sales (of Jaguar Land Rover JLR)," Tata Motors president and chief financial officer C. Ramakrishnan told reporters.

JLR shifted only half the number of luxury cars that it sold in the same period last year, Ramakrishnan said.

A sales increase in India helped stem the slide in profits, the company said in a statement.

Consolidated revenue slid 5.57 percent to 610.20 billion rupees ($9.53 billion) from 646.83 billion rupees, while revenue from JLR fell to 5 billion pounds ($7.76 billion) from 5.35 billion pounds.

In India, the firm earned 8.05 billion rupees in the quarter to June, lower than last year due to a rise in costs to 1.17 billion rupees ($174.59 million) from 945 million rupees a year ago.

Tata Motors is hugely reliant on revenues from JLR, which it bought for $2.3 billion from Ford in 2008 at the height of the global financial crisis.