Steel Tycoon
Lakshmi Mittal, the 57 year old non resident Indian living in Kensington,
London, is the fourth richest person in the world, with a personal fortune
of US$45.0 billion according to Forbes magazine. The Financial Times named
Lakshmi Mittal its 2006 Person of the Year. This London-based Indian billionaire
industrialist, was named one of the "100 most influential people"
by Time magazine in May 2007. He was also listed as the richest person in
Britain in the Sunday Times Rich list 2005. Since 2005, Mittal has been the
richest person residing in the United Kingdom, the richest person in Asia
and the 4th richest person on the planet. He is the President of the Board
of Directors and CEO of Arcelor Mittal, the world's largest producer of steel.
Arcelor Mittal is the combination of the world’s number one and number two
steel companies, Arcelor and Mittal Steel.
Lakshmi Narayan Mittal alias Lakshmi Niwas Mittal was born on
June 15th, 1950, in Sadulpur, a village which didn't have electricity until
1960's, in Rajasthan, India. His family moved to Calcutta in West Bengal, where
he studied accounting and business at the prestigious St. Xavier’s College.
His father Mohan Lal Mittal had set up a small steel mill in Calcutta.
After class, Mittal used to work in his father's company.
After finishing his Bachelor of Commerce degree in business and
accounting with first class, Mittal began his career in his father's steel firm
in the early seventies. Realizing the fact that opportunities in
India are limited for him, Mittal moved to Indonesia in 1976 and with his father's
backing founded a steel plant, Ispat Indo and made the company a success. There
began a saga of triumphs for the shrewd businessman.
His success has largely been built on buying up loss-making state-owned
mills and quickly turning them around. He had one of his most notable successes
in the late 1989, when he turned around a loss-making government-founded steel
firm in Trinidad and Tobago which was losing $1 million a day. Within a year,
Mittal had doubled the output and made the business profitable where US consultants
and German experts failed to find a solution.
In 1992, he went to Mexico and bought the country's third largest
steel producer, Sicartsa for $220 million. This was followed by an acquisition
of Siderurgica del Balsas SA at Lazaro Cardenas in Mexico and then more companies
in Canada, Germany, Ireland etc. Mittal followed the same strategy in
former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan, and took over the state-owned blast furnace
steel plant in 1995, renaming it Ispat Karmet. It was a risky proposition even
by Mittal’s standards, workers had not been paid for six months. But within
a year it was profitable and production has doubled from 120,000 tons a month
to 250,000. In 1995, two new companies Ispat
International Ltd. and Ispat Shipping were formed to
provide technical and commercial services to the Group and to meet its growing
shipping needs. The same year, he entered into Europe by acquiring a
steel plant in Hamburg, Germany. With this, the capacity of the group
reached to 11.2 million tonnes.
Meanwhile in 1994, a partition in the family business
group, transferred all the foreign business into Ispat International, under
the control of Lakshmi Mittal. The Indian operations remained with his younger
brothers P K Mittal and V K Mittal. In 1997, Ispat International, the
company that controlled the Group’s steel making operations in Mexico,
Trinidad and Tobago, Canada and Germany went for listing in 1997 on the New
York and Amsterdam stock exchanges. The Ispat group went on making major acquisitions.
In 2004, Mittal Steel was formed through the merger of Ispat International
and LNM Holdings, at the same time Ispat International merged with International
Steel Group Inc. (ISG) an Ohio based company, becoming the world's most
global steel producer with a net worth of over $22 billion. Mittal's
industrial empire has steel making facilities in 14 countries and stretches
from Indonesia to Poland, via Mexico, US, South Africa and Trinidad, North America,
Africa, Asia and many European countries. In 2006, after six months of
negotiations and major oppositions Mittal steel took over European steel giant
Arselor SA for 26 billion euros ($33 billion), becoming the world's largest 100
million tonne steel entity. The merged entity would be called Arcelor Mittal
with the Mittal family owning 43.6 percent of the combined group.
Mittal has received accolades
for his achievements. In 1996, he was awarded the title 'Steel maker of the
Year' by New Steel Magazine in the USA, and he received the Eighth Honorary
Willy Korf Steel Vision Award, the highest recognition for world wide achievement
in the steel industry in June 1998. The award was presented by the American
Metal Market, a specialised publication, and Paine Weber’s World Steel Dynamics
in New York., for outstanding vision, entrepreneurship, leadership and success
in global steel development, from the American Metal Market and Paine Weber’s
World Steel Dynamics. In 2004, he was awarded the 'European Business man
of the year' by Fortune Magazine.
Although steel manufacturing remains the group’s mainstream business,
they have diversified into shipping and has ventured into coal, power and oil
enterprises in Kazakhstan.
Mittal is an active philanthropist and a member of various trusts.
The LNM Group Foundation was created in 1998 to support health and education
needs of the poor, particularly in India. He resides in a palatial home known
as Summer Palace, in London that he bought in 2003 for a residential record
of $129 million. On the rare occasions when he is at home, Mittal keeps a disciplined
schedule, doing yoga for an hour every day and trying to catch a swim in his
indoor pool. His wife Usha runs the Indonesian business and his son Aditya and daughter
Vanisha are members of the Board of Directors of Mittal Steel.
The business empire has also been in the news for showering money
on his two children. His daughter Vanisha's wedding to Delhi-born investment
banker Amit Bhatia in 2004 June is reputed to have cost more than $55-million,
with five days of events at some of France's most famous settings, including
the 17th century Vaux le Vicomte chateau. For the wedding of his son Aditya
in 1998, the Mittal family celebrated at Calcutta's Victoria Memorial, home
to mementos of Britain's rule over India.
Contact Address :
Lakshmi Mittal
Berkeley Square House
7th Floor
Berkeley Square
London W1J 6DA
England
Tel: +44 20 7629 7988
Fax: +44 20 7629 7993
Website : www.mittalsteel.com
