About Lakshmi Mittal

LAKSHMI N MITTAL (62nd on the Forbes list)

When Lakshmi N Mittal joined the steel business, he was just following in the footsteps of his father, Mohan, who had set up Ispat Steel in the 1950s.

But Lakshmi had the vision that was needed to turn a local firm into a global player. In 1976, when the Indian government started heavily restricting domestic steel production, he opened a state-of-the-art mill in Indonesia.

From there his search for non-scrap iron to feed his plant took him to Trinidad and Tobago, where he in 1989 took on Iscott, a government-founded steel firm which was losing more than $100,000 a day. Within a year, of his taking it over, Iscott was making a profit.

From then on, Mittal embarked on a decade of international expansions buying plants in Mexico, Canada, Germany, Ireland and Kazakhstan. In 1995, he transferred the firm's headquarters from Indonesia to London and settled there.

Nine years later, he was put at the number four spot in The Sunday Times' rich list for with his fortune estimated at £2.2 billion. Mittal has not been entirely free of controversies. His decision to buy the Romanian State-owned steel plant, Sidex, ran into trouble when the involvement of British Prime Minister Tony Blair was revealed.

But the buyout helped propel LNM, as his group is known, to the fourth spot in the world steel makers' league. 53-year old Mittal ranks 62 in the Forbes' list with a net worth of $6.2 billion.