As the CEO of the largest steel-making company in the world, Lakshmi Mittal is one of the wealthiest and powerful people in the world.
Lakshmi Mittal was born in 1950 in a small town in India called Sadulpur, in Rajasthan. His parents later moved to Calcutta to start a family business which he joined after graduating from college with excellent grades.
Inspired ‘by the massive rollers driven by rubber belts and pulleys that flattened the red-hot steel into bars,' Mittal went on to found the LNM Group in 1976 at the age of 26 and has been responsible for the development of its businesses ever since. He set up his first steel mill, in Indonesia, producing 26,000 tonnes and generating annual profit of $1m.
In 2006, at the age of 58, Lakshmi Mittal took the world by storm by beating all European establishments to acquire Arcelor Steel, a company created through a merger of firms from Spain, France, Luxembourg and Belgium. Arcelor chairman, Guy Dolle, was forced to swallow his words after controversially dismissing Mittal Steel as a company of Indians paying with monkey money. After a long drawn battle, Arcelor’s shareholders decided to sell out despite opposition to the deal from politicians including former French President Jacques Chirac.
ArcelorMittal is now worth over £100bn. Lakshmi Mittal is proud to be Indian, but he considers himself a ‘global citizen’ and chooses to stay out of the social limelight.
