A steel empire built by acquisition
Lakshmi Mittal's fortune rests on his family's controlling stake in ArcelorMittal, the steel company he assembled over three decades. His approach was consistent: buy steel plants that governments or other owners were struggling to run, often at low prices, then cut costs, improve operations and link the plants together so they could share raw materials, know-how and customers.
He started in 1976 with a small mill in Indonesia, set up as an offshoot of his family's steel business in India. In 1989 he took over the state owned Iron and Steel Company of Trinidad and Tobago, which was losing money, and turned it around. Similar deals followed in Mexico, Canada, Germany, Kazakhstan and several Central and Eastern European countries as governments privatized their steel industries in the 1990s and early 2000s.
His companies were brought together under Ispat International, listed in 1997, and later LNM Holdings. In 2004 he merged them and acquired International Steel Group in the United States to create Mittal Steel. Two years later he made a hostile bid for the European steelmaker Arcelor. After months of resistance from Arcelor's management and some European governments, the deal went through, and ArcelorMittal was born.
ArcelorMittal and family holdings
ArcelorMittal is headquartered in Luxembourg and listed in Amsterdam, Paris, Luxembourg, Madrid and New York. It has steel making and mining operations on several continents, producing flat and long steel for carmakers, construction, appliances and packaging, and it owns iron ore mines in Canada, Liberia and elsewhere.
In 2019 ArcelorMittal and Nippon Steel jointly acquired Essar Steel, a large Indian steelmaker that had gone through insolvency, creating ArcelorMittal Nippon Steel India. The joint venture has been expanding capacity in India, a market Mittal has long tried to enter at scale.
The company has also sold or closed assets as the steel cycle turned, and it exited some operations, including in Kazakhstan, after a fatal mine accident and a dispute with the government there in 2023.
Mittal is executive chairman. His son Aditya Mittal became chief executive in 2021. The family has held a large stake in the company for decades, mainly through a family trust structure. Mittal also owned a stake in the London football club Queens Park Rangers for several years. His ownership of the steel group has been remarkably stable, and the family has kept its leading position as the main shareholder through the industry's many booms and slumps.
Rajasthan, Kolkata and the family firm
Lakshmi Niwas Mittal was born in 1950 in Sadulpur, a town in Rajasthan, India. His family later moved to Kolkata, where his father, Mohan Lal Mittal, ran a steel business. He graduated in commerce from St. Xavier's College in Kolkata and joined the family firm.
In the mid 1970s he went to Indonesia to start a new mill, a move that set him on an international path. Over the following years the family's business was divided, with Lakshmi Mittal taking the international operations and his brothers keeping businesses in India.
He moved to London in the mid 1990s and has been based there for much of his career, which raised his profile in British business and society. His daughter Vanisha married in a widely reported ceremony near Paris in 2004.
Philanthropy and public life
Mittal has funded education, health and sports causes in India and Britain. In India he founded the LNM Institute of Information Technology in Jaipur and supported hospitals and schools. The Mittal Champions Trust, launched in the early 2000s, supported Indian athletes preparing for international competition, including the Olympic Games.
In Britain, ArcelorMittal provided the steel and much of the funding for the ArcelorMittal Orbit, the red observation tower in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park built for the London 2012 Games. He has given to universities, including Harvard, where the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute bears his name, and to cancer research and hospitals in London.
He has served on advisory boards and councils in several countries and on the boards of large companies, including Goldman Sachs. In India he received the Padma Vibhushan, one of the highest civilian honors, in 2008.