New Delhi: Coming from his humble roots in Sadulpur in Churu district of Rajasthan, Lakshmi Niwas Mittal can now sit pretty at Kensington Palace Gardens, London, as the King of Steel.
On Sunday, world’s two largest steel producers got wedded to form a new conglomerate called Arcelor-Mittal. The deal came at the culmination of a prolonged takeover bid by Mittal Steel, world's largest steelmaker which is owned by Indian billionaire Lakshmi Mittal.
According to the deal, Lakshmi Mittal will be the co-chairman of the new firm with Joseph Kinsch, the Arcelor chairman, and the majority of the new board members will be from Arcelor.
Mittal's journey to being the third richest man in the world is a long one. With over 30 years of experience working in steel and related industries, the steel magnate is well-known for his sheer grit, determination and his counter-intuitive business moves.
He graduated from St. Xavier’s College in Calcutta where he received a Bachelor of Commerce degree. He began his career working in the family’s steelmaking business in India - Ispat India. At 26, he left for Indonesia to oversee the family's mill, now called Ispat Indo.
He founded Mittal Steel (formerly the LNM Group) in 1976 and has been responsible for the development of its businesses ever since. Soon, Mittal became a frontrunner in the development of integrated mini-mills and the use of Direct Reduced Iron (DRI) as a scrap substitute for steelmaking.
It was in the late '80s that Mittal began acquiring mills in places like Trinidad and followed that up in Canada. The mills gave him a strong base in North America.
Though in the early '90s, he focused mainly on North America, he soon began venturing into Western Europe and bought plants in Ireland, France and Germany. It was in '95 that he decided he needed to be more centrally placed and shifted base to London.
In the same year, he entered the Kazakhastan market by purchasing giant Karmet steelworks. The riskiest and most ambitious buy is now one the biggest profit-making units. Now, Mittal Steel has assets in Romania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, South Africa, Poland, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, the United States, Ukraine and other countries.
In the last three years alone, Mittal has acquired steel units in Algeria, South Africa, Romania and the Czech Republic. And in each, he has had an alchemist's effect.
He was awarded Fortune magazines 'European Businessman of the Year 2004' and also 'Steelmaker of the Year' in 1996 by New Steel. In 2002 he was involved in a political scandal with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, when a donation he made to the Labour party led to Blair's intervention in a business deal favouring Mittal. In March 2005, Forbes Magazine named him the 3rd richest man in the world and the richest non-American, with an estimated wealth of US$25 billion.
His house in Kensington, bought in 2003 for $128 million is the most expensive house ever purchased. He also paid upwards of $55 million to host his daughter's wedding celebration in Versailles in 2004.
With a remarkable eye for a bargain and the art of turning around rundown steel mills, Mittal will be out there in front stoking up blast furnaces around the world.
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