1.5 Billion Pound Man

THE billionaire who came in from the blue. Unheard of in London a year ago, this chattering city now finds him settled at the top of The Sunday Times millionaire list—the sizing up of big money stardom that has turned business success into a society coup. And in a city where such money rankings sit like epaulets on a general's shoulders, Laxmi Mittal, as the seventh richest person in Britain, is now Billionaire-in-Chief among Asians.

A steel magnate who moved his office to London from Jakarta only last year, Mittal suddenly has a £1.5-billion prefix before his name, making him six times richer than the Queen of England, and putting him ahead of the Hindujas and fellow steel magnate Swraj Paul. And making him the world's richest Indian.

바카라 웹사이트The list has done more for Mittal than the PR firm he hired last year to let the world know who he is and what he does. After they shifted residence to London, Laxmi Mittal, 47, and his wife Usha Mittal, a director in his company Ispat International, moved fast to be seen at the right places and gain access to everyone who matters. Within months, Mittal was shaking hands with royalty, was being seen on stage at cultural evenings and had the paparazzi flashing away at parties he attended. Mittal's arrival was not excessively modest. Some of his successes so far have been "dramatic", he says, and this year the group plans to "continue our climb". A climb that has been more sudden than continual.

Mittal began badly in Calcutta. Following a break-up with his father in 1976, the scion of the Mittal family—owners of the Nippon Denro Group in India—was banished to Indonesia to look after their small steel trading business there. In London, however, he started at the top, upstartish as it must seem to the now lesser millionaires. The city is now watching to see how much further he climbs up the millionaire ladder. The Sunday Times focused particularly on his wife, the woman in sari behind the man of steel. In the style appropriate to the sought after, Mittal now says little, but gets much talked about. Uncertainty becomes mystery; mystery becomes mystique.

And his mystique sits on steel. Ispat today is ranked among the largest—if not the largest—privately-owned steel makers in the world. It manufactures steel in Kazakhstan (up to six million tonnes a year), Mexico, Canada, Trinidad and Tobago, Ireland, Germany, Indonesia, the US and Britain. Of its production, 70 per cent is exported through marketing offices in 60 countries, according to his PR firm. Last year, revenues from the Ispat network crossed $2.8 billion (Rs 10,000 crore), and its assets totalled over $6 billion (Rs 22,000 crore). How did all that happen?

The steel mill he opened in Indonesia was in the realm of success. But of late, Mittal has begun to steelroller the world market. Over the past four years, Ispat grew by an amazing 80 per cent. What's truly fuelling this growth is a well-carved out strategy: getting hold of privatisation pro-grammes across the world, new technologies, and a vision that puts these together. It works like this: he identifies loss-making plants that governments across the world want to sell off, buys them cheap and turns them around by slashing costs, bringing in DRI (direct reduced iron) technology and jacking up operational efficiency.

This strategy has also created power myths around the man. When, for instance, he was buying a government-owned steel plant in Ireland, some nations of the European Union protested against importing from this plant, as it was not owned by an European. Within 48 hours, goes the lore, the Irish prime minister flew down to Brussels with Irish citizenship papers for Mittal. The man is also said to be the most powerful in Trinidad and Tobago, capable of changing government policies with one phone call. "He is one of the most technologically advanced and cost-effective producers," says Gokul Binani, industrialist and Mittal's old pal from St Xavier's College, Calcutta—and with a net worth of £15 million, the 37th richest Asian in the UK. Without the help of an MBA degree, Mittal has achieved what management books go on about—cutting production costs and increasing production. And he did that bypassing all the traditional methods of making steel. "He has adapted and created an entire industry out of the DRI process," says Binani.

DRI is a method of sourcing steel production from manufactured iron pellets rather than scrap. "It brings higher purity, costs less than pig iron and limits exposure to volatile scrap markets," says Ananya Sarin, a spokeswoman for the Ispat Group. The DRI process is carried out by the Midrex and the Hylsa technologies. Ispat uses both these in its plants, which are backed by a strong supply of low cost natural gas essential for the DRI process. Says Mittal, with typical understatement: "Our DRI strategy has progressed." Indeed: Ispat is now the world's largest producer of liquid steel using DRI-related technology.

But this technology is no secret. What's got Mittal his steel plants going, says Binani, is "his ability to organise funds, and to create investor and banking confidence while he negotiates purchasing companies around the world." Mittal can speak blandly about continuing his climb with the support of employees, customers, financial institutions, "and the respective governments".

Last year was what he calls "an eventful year"—he acquired three companies. Irish Ispat is one. Ispat is now erecting a 1.2-million tonnes per annum (TPA) steel plant in Mexico. The DRI-wise steel maker is building with it a 3.5-million TPA plant that makes iron pellets used in the manufacture of steel. An order has been placed now, he says, for another 1.4-million TPA plant in Trinidad and Tobago. Altogether, these add up to 12.5 million tonnes of liquid steel per annum. That's a lot of steel—6.7 times the capacity of the Durgapur steel plant.

Mittal is building on steel but not resting on it. Employing close to 40,000 people, Mittal has added on a 435-MW power plant and bought 15 coal mines with reserves of about 1.5 billion tonnes—enough to keep miners busy for a century—in Kazakhstan. After the forays into power generation and mining, he has diversified into rail transportation, textiles, shipping and healthcare. This year, he has formalised a US marketing, trading and DRI hub with Ispat America Inc. He understates again: "The acquisitions are satisfactory."

바카라 웹사이트So are the fruits. A palatial home in London where his neigh-bours are Akio Morita, the legendary founder of Sony, and the Arab royalty. Last summer, he got M.F. Husain to paint a large mural covering a whole wall for an undisclosed sum. Mittal's problem had earlier been that he had money and power, but yet found himself only on the fringes of high society. Now, that too is changing. And how.

Steel the world over, style in London. Only India seems to be missing somewhere.