Lakshmi Mittal
Lakshmi Mittal is an Indian-born steel magnate who built ArcelorMittal, the largest steel producer in the world outside China, through four decades of acquisitions on five continents. He serves as executive chairman, having handed the chief executive role to his son Aditya Mittal in 2021.
Mittal's career is the clearest example in modern heavy industry of a business built by buying what others were disposing of. He acquired loss-making state-owned and distressed steel plants in Indonesia, Trinidad and Tobago, Mexico, Kazakhstan, Romania, South Africa, Ukraine, the United States and elsewhere, restructured them, and assembled from them a company producing tens of millions of tonnes of steel a year.
Early life and education
Mittal was born on 15 June 1950 in Sadulpur, a town in the Churu district of Rajasthan, India, into a Marwari family. He has described a childhood in a house without electricity, shared with an extended family.
The family moved to Calcutta, where his father Mohan Lal Mittal became a partner in a steel business. Mittal studied at St Xavier's College, Calcutta, taking a degree in commerce, and joined the family firm.
Career
Indonesia and the first plant
In 1976 Mittal was sent to Indonesia to dispose of a plot of land the family had acquired. He concluded instead that a steel plant should be built on it, and established PT Ispat Indo, which began production in 1978.
The decision to build abroad rather than in India was determined by circumstance. Indian industry at the time operated under the licensing system known as the Licence Raj, which restricted capacity, investment and imports and made expansion at home extremely slow. Operating outside India freed the business from those constraints, and the international orientation established at that point never changed.
The acquisition model
Through the 1980s and 1990s Mittal developed the method that defined the business: buying steel plants that their owners, usually governments, wished to be rid of.
He took over the Iron and Steel Company of Trinidad and Tobago under a management contract in 1989 and subsequently bought it, turning a plant that had lost money for years into a profitable one within a short period. Sibalsa in Mexico followed in 1992, bought from the state for a fraction of what it had cost to build. Karmet in Kazakhstan was acquired in 1995, a vast integrated works at Temirtau together with its coal mines, power stations and the social infrastructure of an entire city, in the chaotic period following the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Further acquisitions followed in Germany, Ireland, France, Algeria, Romania, South Africa, Poland, Czechia, Bosnia and Ukraine, where the Kryvorizhstal works was bought in 2005 for about US$4.8 billion in a re-run auction after the original privatisation had been annulled.
The common features of these transactions were that the assets were distressed or state-owned, that they were bought cheaply, and that they were restructured by reducing employment substantially, improving operating practice and connecting them to the group's purchasing and technical resources. Mittal's argument was that steel is a business of scale and of raw material security, and that a global producer could withstand the cycle that repeatedly destroyed national ones.
Separation from the family business
Mittal separated his international operations from the family's Indian business in the mid-1990s following a division among the brothers, taking the overseas assets, which became Ispat International and subsequently the LNM Group. Ispat International listed in Amsterdam and New York in 1997.
Mittal Steel and the Arcelor takeover
In 2004 Mittal acquired the International Steel Group in the United States, the company Wilbur Ross had assembled from the bankrupt remains of Bethlehem Steel, LTV and others, and combined it with his own holdings to create Mittal Steel, then the largest steel producer in the world.
In January 2006 Mittal Steel made a hostile offer for Arcelor, the European producer formed from the French, Spanish and Luxembourg national champions. The bid provoked an extraordinary political reaction. European politicians objected in terms that were widely regarded as having a racial dimension, the Luxembourg government, a shareholder, opposed it, and Arcelor's management sought a defensive merger with Severstal of Russia.
Mittal raised the offer and secured shareholder support, and the merger was agreed in June 2006 at a value of about €26 billion, creating ArcelorMittal, a company producing roughly ten per cent of the world's steel. The episode is a standard case study in hostile takeover defence and in the politics of European industrial ownership.
ArcelorMittal
The years since have been difficult for the industry rather than for the strategy. Chinese production expanded enormously, at one point exceeding half the world's output, and Chinese exports depressed prices globally for much of the 2010s. ArcelorMittal recorded very large losses in 2015 and 2016, wrote down assets substantially, raised capital, and sold or closed a number of operations.
The company subsequently restructured towards fewer, better assets, acquired Essar Steel in India through the insolvency process in 2019 in a joint venture with Nippon Steel, and returned to strong profitability during the commodity conditions of 2021 and 2022.
Aditya Mittal, his son, became chief executive in 2021, with Lakshmi Mittal continuing as executive chairman.
Decarbonisation
Steelmaking accounts for roughly seven to eight per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions, and the industry faces a transition problem more difficult than most. The conventional blast furnace route uses coking coal not merely as a fuel but as the chemical reducing agent that removes oxygen from iron ore, so the emissions are inherent in the process rather than incidental to it.
ArcelorMittal has committed to reducing emissions substantially and has pursued two routes: electric arc furnaces melting scrap, which is established technology but limited by scrap availability, and direct reduced iron using hydrogen in place of coal, which works chemically but requires very large quantities of hydrogen produced without emissions, which does not yet exist at the scale required or at an economic price.
The company has been publicly critical of European policy on the point, arguing that carbon costs imposed on European producers without equivalent measures on imports would relocate production rather than reduce emissions, and it delayed several announced hydrogen projects citing the absence of affordable hydrogen and of a policy framework that would make the resulting steel saleable.
Personal life
Mittal has lived in London since 1995. His house on Kensington Palace Gardens, bought in 2004 for a reported £57 million, was at the time the most expensive residential property ever sold in the United Kingdom.
The wedding of his daughter Vanisha in 2004, held over several days in France with events at Versailles, was reported to have cost tens of millions of pounds and became a fixture of British newspaper coverage of him.
He made donations to the British Labour Party and was involved in a political controversy in 2002 concerning a letter of support written by the Prime Minister regarding the privatisation of a Romanian steel plant. He established the Mittal Champions Trust, which supported Indian athletes, following India's poor performance at the 2004 Olympic Games.
He was reported in 2025 to be considering leaving the United Kingdom following changes to the taxation of non-domiciled residents, part of a wider movement of internationally mobile wealthy individuals in the same period.
Assessment
Mittal's achievement is a matter of record and is unusual in its kind. He built the largest steel company outside China from nothing, in an industry that is capital-intensive, cyclical, politically sensitive and entered by almost nobody, and he did it by acquiring assets that their owners regarded as worthless.
The method's insight was that a steel plant in difficulty is usually not a bad plant but a badly run one, frequently constrained by a government's employment or pricing obligations, and that the same asset in different hands can be profitable. Applying that across twenty countries required a tolerance for political and operational risk that few industrial companies possess.
The criticisms follow from the same method. The restructurings involved very large reductions in employment in places, notably in Kazakhstan, Ukraine and parts of Eastern Europe, where the plants were the only employer and where the social consequences were severe. Safety records at several acquired operations drew sustained criticism, particularly in Kazakhstan, where a series of fatal accidents at the Temirtau complex culminated in a mine disaster in 2023 that killed dozens of workers, after which the government took the operations into state ownership. Environmental performance at older plants has been a recurring subject of dispute with regulators and residents in several countries.
The structural question is whether the consolidated global steel producer he pioneered is the right model for the industry's next phase. The scale advantages remain, but the transition away from coal-based production requires investment of a kind that is difficult to justify in a cyclical business competing with producers facing no equivalent obligation, and that is a problem of policy as much as of management.