Lakshmi Mittal

Lakshmi Niwas Mittal built the largest steel company in the world, and he built almost none of it in India — a fact that makes his career one of the purest expressions of the diaspora's industrial genius. He was born on 15 June 1950 in Sadulpur, a village in the Churu district of Rajasthan, into a Marwari family from the community that has produced so many of India's traders and industrialists. His grandfather had worked for a trading firm; his father, Mohanlal Mittal, ran a steel business.

A Calcutta apprenticeship

The family moved to Calcutta, where the young Lakshmi grew up and was educated at St Xavier's College, taking a degree in commerce while absorbing the family trade from the inside. Indian steel in that era was hemmed in by licensing and state control — the "Licence Raj" that throttled private industrial ambition — and it was clear to Mittal early that if he wanted to build at scale, he would have to build abroad.

Indonesia, and the founding move

The decisive moment came in 1976. He was twenty-six. A family venture had acquired a struggling steel plant in Indonesia that the family had considered simply selling; Mittal went out to run it instead. He turned it around, and in doing so discovered both his method and his appetite. That Indonesian plant, PT Ispat Indo, became the seed of a global empire, and Mittal spent the next three decades separating his own expanding international business from the family's Indian operations.

The method: buy what nobody wants

His strategy was singular and he repeated it with remarkable consistency. Across the 1980s and 1990s he sought out failing, unloved, often state-owned steel mills that other buyers avoided — in Trinidad, in Mexico, in Kazakhstan, in Canada, across the crumbling post-Soviet economies of Eastern Europe — bought them cheaply, imposed operational discipline and modern management, and made them profitable. Where others saw a fragmented, cyclical, low-margin industry in terminal decline, Mittal saw a consolidation waiting to happen, and he became its agent, stitching together mills on four continents into a single company, Mittal Steel.

The Arcelor battle

The strategy culminated in 2006 in the most dramatic corporate takeover of the era. Mittal Steel mounted a bid for Arcelor, the Luxembourg-based European champion and the symbol of Continental steelmaking. The fight was bitter and, at moments, ugly. Arcelor's management resisted fiercely, and some of the resistance carried an unmistakable edge of condescension — and worse — toward an Indian buyer daring to swallow a European crown jewel; one executive's dismissive comparison drew accusations of racism. Mittal prevailed. The merger created ArcelorMittal, by far the largest steel producer in the world, and across India the victory was received as a kind of national vindication: the empire's furnaces, bought by a man from a village in Rajasthan.

London life and philanthropy

Mittal had based himself in London from the mid-1990s, and became one of Britain's richest residents, at times its very richest. The attendant fixtures followed: a mansion on Kensington Palace Gardens, reputedly among the most expensive homes in the world; a daughter's wedding in France so lavish it entered legend. So did the philanthropy — the Mittal Champions Trust, which funded Indian athletes in the years when Indian Olympic success was scarce, and major gifts to institutions including Great Ormond Street Hospital and to education. He became a figure in British public life, with the scrutiny that brings, including controversy over political donations.

Succession and legacy

He stepped back from day-to-day command in 2021, handing the chief executive's role to his son Aditya Mittal, who had been his closest lieutenant through the Arcelor campaign, while remaining executive chairman. The company they run produces steel across the globe and remains a bellwether of the world economy, its fortunes rising and falling with construction and manufacturing everywhere.

Why the Roll remembers him

Mittal belongs on the Roll as the diaspora's definitive industrial epic. The professional diaspora is full of executives who rose to run companies other people founded; Mittal built his, from a single salvaged plant in Indonesia into the largest enterprise in one of the world's foundational industries, and he did it as an outsider forcing his way into a business — global heavy industry — that had no place reserved for an Indian. His career is a rebuke to the idea that the diaspora's genius is confined to software and services. The village boy who learned the steel trade at his father's side in Calcutta ended by consolidating an entire global industry under his name, and by teaching the old steelmaking powers of Europe that the future of their business might be decided by a man from Rajasthan.

The politics and the peak

Mittal's rise was not without friction beyond the boardroom. In 2002 he was drawn into a British political controversy — the so-called "Mittal affair" — when it emerged that Prime Minister Tony Blair had written a letter supporting one of his companies' bids in Romania shortly after a large donation to the Labour Party, a storm that said as much about the discomfort of the British establishment with a newly powerful Indian magnate as about the facts. Through the 2000s Mittal was routinely ranked among the very richest people on Earth, for a time the wealthiest man in Britain and in Europe, and his fortune became a symbol, in India, of how far a diaspora industrialist could climb.

The cyclical trade

Steel is a brutally cyclical business, and Mittal's later years brought the hard side of it. A flood of cheap Chinese steel, collapsing global prices, and heavy debt battered ArcelorMittal in the 2010s, forcing painful restructuring, mine and mill closures, and years of pressure on the share price — a reminder that the empire he had assembled by consolidating a troubled industry remained hostage to that industry's swings. He navigated it, steadied the company, and in 2021 handed the chief executive's role to his son Aditya while remaining executive chairman. The family also expanded beyond steel into energy and new ventures. Whatever the cycle, the achievement stands: a man from a village in Rajasthan built, and still leads, one of the foundational enterprises of the modern industrial world, on four continents, under his own name.