By IANS,
New Delhi : With $30 billion lined up for investments in his native country by steel tycoon Lakshmi Niwas Mittal, the Indian capital was host to Arcelor-Mittal group’s second leadership summit where 700 top executives from 60 countries brainstormed over three days over global strategies.
Huddled in the conference hall of the Taj Palace Hotel here, these executives not only had a taste of the vision which the Rajasthan-born, Kolkata-educated and London-based Mittal has for the global steel space, but also a talk on what India has in store for global investors – straight from Finance Minister P. Chidambaram.
This was only the second time after Mittals acquired Arcelor that a leadership summit of such a scale was organised by the group and the previous event was at the Mediterranean settings of Cannes, south of France, company officials said.
“Transforming Tomorrow through Sustainable Growth” was the general theme of the summit here – not much different from the theme at Cannes, entitled “Arcelor Mittal Transforming Tomorrow”.
A similar conference was held at Gleneagles, Scotland a few years ago, but the Areclor was not part of the group – which is today the undisputed leader in the global steel industry with revenues of $105.2 billion and a crude steel production of 116 million tonnes, representing around 10 percent of the world steel output.
“Our group has lined up investments worth $50 billion globally and $30 billion for India alone. And the investment in India will be in greenfield projects, unlike the money we generally spend on takeovers in other markets,” said a senior official of the group.
“So you can see how important India is in our scheme of things,” the official told IANS, requesting anonymity.
During some of the sessions, in areas ranging from human resources to competition, sharing the dais with Mittal was his son Aditya who spoke as the chief financial officer of the group that has a presence in 60 countries.
Also sharing their perspective were some of the other members of the group’s management board, which includes Gonzalo Urquijo, Sudhir Maheshwari, Christophe Cornier and Davinder Chugh.
Mittal himself came straight from Singapore, after receiving the third Forbes Lifetime Achievement Award. “It hasn’t escaped my notice that this award is a lifetime achievement award,” he said, while receiving the award.
“But just to let you know that I haven’t finished yet,” said the 58-year-old industrialist, regarded as the world’s richest Indian, thanks to his 44.7 percent stake in the world’s largest steel-making group.
For India, Mittal still has his eyes set on two steel projects with a capacity of 12 million tonnes each in Orissa and Jharkhand, though he did mention at the leadership summit here that delays had pushed up the cost by 50 percent over the $20 billion that was originally planned.
“We will complete the first phase of the 12 million tonne steel projects in the two states within 36 months of getting all approvals,” he said during a brief moment where selected media organisations were allowed in.