We have seen that mostly in Bollywood movies and rarely in life: a rural youth coming to town chasing glory and living to tell the tale of his success.
MUMBAI: We have seen that mostly in Bollywood movies and rarely in life: a rural youth coming to town chasing glory and living to tell the tale of his success.
One such story — beyond celluloid illusion — started in 1975 when a gawky, 19-year-old youth from rural Bihar came to Mumbai.... And the rest is the story of Anil Agarwal, the billionaire metal maven. Strolling down the Marine Drive in those formative years, Agarwal — who started off as a scrap dealer — used to be awestruck by the sight of Oberoi Sheraton (now Hilton Towers).
But he couldn’t gather the gumption to enter the lobby of the five-star premises to book a room. Agarwal, who now heads the London Stock Exchange-listed Vedanta Resources, has come a long way since then. In 2006, Vedanta reported a consolidated group revenues of the tune of $3,702 million, a growth of about 95% against calendar year 2005. With homes in tony Mayfair in London, Agarwal is planning to enter the steel business.
Till last week, Agarwal has been uncharacteristically quiet, preferring to concentrate on multi-billion dollar greenfield and brownfield expansions rather than go for bulge bracket acquisitions to grow his Vedanta group. Last week he announced a mega acquisition. Vedanta acquired Sesa Goa for $981 million from Mitsui & Co, the Japanese trading house, beating competition from rivals of repute such as Lakshmi Mittal of Arcelor Mittal and Kumar Mangalam Birla’s Aditya Birla group. Vedanta is the Sterlite Group’s holding company in India.
Agarwal has always coined innovative ways to grow, be it buying used copper- making plants from Australia, shaving off costs up to a billion dollars in the process or order competitively priced mega power plants from China to fire his kilns. Of late, he has set his eyes on another project.
Struck by the munificence that created Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, and Stanford, Agarwal wants to do something similar in India. So, he is making an endowment of up to $1 billion (Rs4,435 crore) to establish a “world-class, multi-disciplinary university”. His dream project is called Vedanta University and will be set up in the state of Orissa. AT Kearney is the consultant for the project. Agarwal had told DNA Money: “We (the family) have decided to give our wealth back to society,” he said.
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