Men of Steel

Laxmi Nivas Mittal

love him, hate him, but you cannot ignore him.

born in June 1950 in Rajasthan, the eldest of 5 children, did BCom from St Xavier's, Calcutta in 1969 (where his family had moved when he was 6).by then he was already helping his father Mohan Lal with their first mill ISPAT in

Andhra Pradesh.

In 1975, age 25, LNM was sent to East Java near Indonesia by his father, to sell off a steel mill which they had acquired, which had become unviable because of beauraucratic bottlenecks. LNM first went to the retail market to check the price of steel bars & rods and realised that they could make a good margin if he made steel locally as against imported Japanese steel. But he did not have enough cash. But he knew that if he purchased machinary & equipment in India and exported it to Indonesia, the Indian government had a scheme to provide 85% of cost of exports through a LC. He obtained $3 million loan from Bank of India, Singapore against the same, and was in business. He hired 400 locals as labour and a friend Mr Agarwal from India to manage.

By 1978, after his son Aditya was born, he was making 26,000 tonnes of steel and by 1989 he was making 330,000 tonnes. He wanted to grow a lot more and realised that building steel plants from scratch would take a long time. So he decided to adopt the inorganic growth strategy.

In 1989, he took th

e loss making ISCOTT in the Caribbean and revamped the management by firing 60 Germans who cost $20million and replaced them with 60 Indian boys who cost $2million. one of them was a Chartered Accountant - Sudhir Maheshwari. By 1993, ISCOTT became ISPAT Caribbean and was making a million tonnes of steel profitably.

LNM had a simple vision - state owned steel mills with govt intervention had no place in the modern world. He went on a bargain hunting spree acquiring sick govt steel mills and turning them around.

In 1994 he bought Lazaro Cardenas in Mexico; Sidbec Dosco in Quebec, Canada both financed by Credit Suisse, where an analyst was totally impressed with Laxmi Mittal. His name - Jeremy Fletcher.

B.Muthuraman/ Ratan Tata

Balasubramanian Muthuramanstarted as a 'graduate trainee' in Tata Steel right after graduation from IIT Madras, he spent some time in the engineering and iron & steel making side of the company before moving to sales and marketing. He has spent most of his career in sales and marketing after completion of MBA from XLRI.

Muthuraman retired in 2009 after being the Managing Director for 10 years from 2000-01. he succeded the legendary Dr J.J.Irani, who himself retired after being the MD for 10 years from 1991-92, when Ratan Tata took up the Chairmanship.

Sajjan Jindal/ Naveen Jindal

Sajjan Jindal & Navin Jindal, both sons of the legendary Mr O.P.Jindal run their separate steel & power empires - JSW Steel and Jindal Steel & Power Limited respectively, as does their brother Ratan Jindal who runs Jindal Steel Limited.

Shri O.P.Jindal was born in 1930 to a farmer father, but always wanted to become an industrialist. He started as a scrap trader and then a small bucket-manufacturing unit. In 1964 he started the Jinal Pipe factory and a much larger one in 1969 in the name of Jindal Strips.