He was witty, charming and blunt. He was dismissive of frivolity, candid about himself and emotional about his son.

He brought the house down when he told a supplier (a Visiting Rotarian) that he hoped the equipment he had ordered would be delivered on time and that it would work as per the specifications that he had paid for.

And when a pesky journalist grabbed the mike to ask whether he was going in for a joint venture with a mining company in Australia, he dismissed her by saying, “If we do something, you will read (about) it in the newspapers”.

Mr. Lakshmi Mittal, the “Steel King” of the world, who addressed the last meeting, did not for a moment suggest either by word, gesture or mannerism that he was one of the most affluent persons on earth; nor did he use his tremendous influence to peddle his own version of a utopian world.

He was deferential to his fellow (Honorary) Rotarians, Ms Rajashree Birla and Mr. Adi Godrej. And, to top it all, he was humility personified when President Nandan Damani inducted him as an Honorary member of the Rotary Club of Bombay.

Mr. Mittal, who flew down from London to address the Club, presented his analysis of the economic crisis that had besieged the world af-ter September, 2008. He described at some length the effect of the global meltdown on his company ArcelorMittal and also listed some of the lessons that he had learnt from the upheaval.

Among the most important points that he made was this: India’s growth rate need not be 7 or 8%; rather, it could be more like 10% – and for several years to come.

Finally, he made a few predictions about the future and cautioned about the “threat” from China whose economy was galloping by leaps and bounds and was poised to overtake the USA sooner rather than later. He then fielded about a dozen questions with aplomb.

The Rooftop Room of the Trident (Oberoi) Hotel was packed to the rafters even before the guest speaker walked up to the podium. It was a wonder that a room with a capacity of less than 250 was able to accommodate more than 300, some of them armed with cameras, tripods and mikes. (The only slightly sour note was the jostling by representatives of the print and electronic media who, however, failed to nettle Mr. Mittal.)

Once the meeting was called to order and the national anthem rendered, Nandan conducted the proceedings with rare élan, impressing the three Honorary Rotarians, Ms Birla, Mr. Godrej and Mr. Mittal, with his simplicity and erudition.

One of the causes of the 2008 meltdown: everyone wanted to become bigger and ‘scale became the name of the game’

The following is a transcript of the  presentation made by Mr. Lakshmi  Mittal at the meeting of the Rotary  Club of Bombay on Thursday,  January 21, 2010:

I am very thankful to Honorary Rotarian Mr. Adi Godrej for his wonderful introduction. I am also thankful to the other Honorary Rotarian present, Ms Rajashree Birla, for getting me into Rotary. She has been working with my wife for the last one and a half years on different causes, especially on polio, and that has really made them come closer. I really thank her for taking so much interest and for persuading (my wife) Usha to take interest in this work.

All of you are leaders in your own professions, all of you are successful in what you are doing and you are contributing a lot to the cause of society and to the community. It was very difficult for me to think of a subject to discuss today. So I decided to share my thoughts with you and also to exchange thoughts with you.

I will share my thoughts on what has happened, what is happening and how to prepare ourselves for the future. It is a very complicated issue and the whole world is analysing it in different ways, in different geographies, in different professions and in different segments. Every week, we get some conclusions, some directions… and it looks like this will continue for many years to come.

At the Davos meeting next week, all the leaders of the world, social leaders, political leaders and business leaders, are getting together and many business people, including Adi (Mr. Godrej) are going to talk. The theme of Davos this year is to “rethink, redesign and rebuild”. Everyone realises that this is a time for redoing everything and rethinking and redesigning our businesses.

There will also be other themes, such as how to strengthen social and economic welfare, how to enhance security, how to mitigate waste, how to mitigate system failures, how to look at different values and how to create sustainable financial institutions.

It will be good to watch the outcome of the Davos meeting. It will be very interesting to see a global view on all the questions that we have in our minds. here has been a crisis and a lot of explanations have been given for the crisis: sub-prime mortgage bubbles, systemic failures, greed, easy credit conditions, leverage, financial innovations which brought a lot of complexities and so on; there have been a lot of reasons and comments which we have been following in the media and in different forums.

 But one thing is very clear – risk management should not be entirely predicted based on historical data. Historically, we can do a lot of regression analysis and say that this (a particular thing) cannot happen for the next 20 years, but things are happening much faster than our regression analysis suggests.

It’s like the “Black Swan theory”, where it was said that there was no Black Swan – and ultimately it was discovered in Australia.

Events that had not been foreseen have been occurring, so we should not work only on historical data.

Too many financial institutions and investors simply outsourced their risk management and we all started relying on rating agencies.

I don’t know how many of you remember that in January, 2008, there were only 12 triple-A companies in the world, but at the same time there were 64,000 complex financial structures which had triple-A!

Everyone wanted to be bigger and bigger. So scale became the name of the game for many years. The risk models showed that the positions would be hedged, (with) credit default swaps; different kinds of instruments started coming into the market from insurance companies but people never understood their fundamentals.

But nobody imagined that there would be a drying up of liquidity and the hedges would not be effected. Everyone (whether the government or the corporate sector) resorted to off-balance sheet activities.

You may well ask, how can I say that the government also had off-balance sheet activities? At a meeting this morning there was some discussion on the oil subsidy. Every year, the government issued Rs. 30,000 to Rs. 40,000 crores worth of bonds to the oil companies. When I asked whether these were part of the budget, they said that it was not – so it is off-balance sheet for the government!

Thus, we had to deal with a kind of situation that we had not faced before. he big question is what can be done to ensure that such a crisis does not occur again? I think we will have a lot of regulations, a lot of processes and a lot of governance.

I have learnt a few things from my perspective which I will share with you.

There is a need to have a willingness to change. A crisis like this is like an earthquake. Tension was building in the world and it suddenly erupted, just like the earthquake in Haiti where suddenly 50,000 to 100,000 people died. Similarly, the global financial crisis erupted suddenly and people were not prepared for it.

I remember that on September 9 or 10, 2008, the whole ArcelorMittal management team was in Delhi. We were 700 people sitting in one room for three and a half days, discussing growth. But come September 15 and we had to change. No one expected that we would have to make a 180degree turn-around.

The second thing we learnt is rapid execution. When there is a basic crisis and we need to immediately execute a new strategy, we cannot be sitting and watching. To do this we have to set clear expectations, work towards driving results, ensure motivations and synchronisations and undertake a lot of different actions that can bring results.

We had to communicate well. I think this is very important – we have learnt that we have to communicate well with people. For us it was one of the most important tasks, for we had to communicate to 300,000 people about the new crisis.

Another point we learnt is that in difficult times there is a need to retain skills and talents. In difficult times, a lot of people want to leave the organisation.

Suddenly, they see that there is a crisis and if someone does not communicate with them or explain things to them, there is a large exodus of talent from the company.

At the same time I also learnt that during good times we are blind-sighted and we don’t worry about the negative side of a situation.

Thus, when all this happened, we had a contagion which soon spread not only to the financial economy but to the real economy. In spite of all government announcements of different stimulus packages and measures, there was a crisis of confidence and there was an unprecedented drop in manufacturing and in employment.

In the fourth quarter of 2008, manufacturing dropped by 20%. In the year 2009 there were an additional 20 million unemployed persons. Today, the world has 200 million unemployed which is the highest unemployment (figure ever).

In the steel industry, demand plunged by 50%. This is not a small number… in a basic industry like steel the demand plunged by 50%.

But ArcelorMittal was different in the sense that we were protected by our diversified product mix and diversified geographies; we are in 60 countries and manufacture all kinds of steel products; that gave us some insurance.

Still, a 50% drop in demand is not a small thing.

What did we do? As I said, on September 9 or 10 we were discussing growth, but on September 15 we turned around 180 degrees and we said “No growth! Let us change our strategy and form a new formula. And this was the three ‘C’s, cash, cost and customer”. The whole strategy from September, 2008, was to focus on these three ‘C’s.

ArcelorMittal was able to raise $11 billion even in the midst of the economic recession

We immediately launched a communication programme; we changed our communications strategy, we made sure that we reached out to each and every employee; we accelerated our process of negotiations, (held) social dialogue with employees (telling them) how this crisis could affect them.

We also started talking with our suppliers, who already had their business plans; we started talking to our customers, who also had their business plans.

Suddenly, a lot of actions were required and we realised that we would have to embark on them (immediately). Spreading all these action plans in an organisation like ArcelorMittal was a very difficult thing to do, what with different languages, different cultures, different issues, different societies, different countries with different government rules and different union rules. But we had to do it.

But we were able to do it very quickly and I remember that in October we had already announced that we would cut production by 50%.

We were the first steel company, the first manufacturing company in the world to announce a 50% production cut. We shocked the world, we shocked our investors, we shocked our shareholders, we shocked our suppliers and our customers. But we had to do it. And we did it.

The first thing we learnt from this was that a company like ArcelorMittal could operate at 50% capacity and still be a viable company. Unless you do it, you don’t know!

In the most difficult times of the steel industry in 2001, when there were 37 bankruptcies in the USA, when the whole European steel industry was restructured, steel companies were operating at 70% capacity. From this you can imagine the depth of the problem from 2001 to 2009.

We converted a lot of fixed costs to variable and reduced fixed costs by $10 billion per year. ArcelorMittal has a fixed cost of $29 to $30 billion a year; we brought it down to $20 billion. We also reduced our debt by $10 billion. We had a net debt of $30 billion in September, 2008; we promised our shareholders that we would bring it down to $20 billion. And we did it.

We said to our investors and our shareholders that we were going to convert our fixed costs into variable costs, and we were very successful.

In that kind of difficult situation, when there was no money available and governments were going bankrupt, there was no possibility of entering the capital market.

But we were well rated by the rating agencies and we raised $11 billion even in such difficult times. This was because of the actions that we took and because of the way we restructured ourselves. I think the market received us very well.

Here are we today on a global basis? I have been talking to many leaders in the world and let me tell you that I have never seen such concerted efforts by global leaders as we have seen in the last 15 months.

Till October-November of 2008, even American Senators and senior Ministers did not understand the depth of the problem. Come January, 2009, and everyone understood it. The G-30 really helped a lot to initiate several actions and coordinated efforts not only at the Presidents’ level, but also at the level of Ministries, Finance Ministers, economic experts and so on. I think that has been a great help in coming out of the crisis.

In spite of all these actions, there are two distinct scenarios in the world. One is that of the developed economies and the other of the emerging markets or the developing world (the growth economies).

In my view, the developed world seems to be coming out of the global recession. But the recovery is going to be long and slow.

There are some forecasts which say that it will be 2013 by the time we reach the pre-crisis level (that of 2007). On the other hand, some economists like Goldman Sachs seem to be a bit more positive. They think that in 2010 the global economy will grow at 4.2% and in 2011 at 4.8%. But we have to understand that we are coming from a very low level (of 2008) and that most of the 4.2% and 4.8% will be coming out of the emerging markets.

Speaking of the developed world, I’ll stick to Europe. Europe has 27 nations. When the Western world enlarged itself into Eastern Europe and became Europe 27, everyone thought that Eastern Europe would offset the stagnation of the western world. But that did not happen; except for Poland, most of the Eastern European countries are in trouble.

Now the PIIGS economies are in trouble. These (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain) are in deeper trouble than other economies.

De-leveraging on the personal front is still continuing. Every person, every individual and small busi-ness is continuing to de-leverage – and this means that there is no growth, there is no consumption. At the same time, small and medium-scale industries are in difficulty because they are not able to get enough liquidity from banks.

Public exchequers are fully stretched. There is a heavy deficit in their economies; they have borrowed heavily and cannot do more. Further, everybody is worried about inflation and the interest rate. (However), today inflation-interest is not really the worry; the question is how will they spend money?

At the same time, European competitiveness is threatened. I tell some of the European leaders jokingly that in 30 years’ time Europe is going to be a tourist place like Disneyland. I think they now see the threat.

The euro (currency) is strong, though there is no need for the euro to be strong in such a bad economic situation. The Chinese are very smart; they have pegged themselves to the dollar, so they continue to beat with the dollar and continue to remain competitive. Europe is not able to do that. Thus there is no positive situation as far as Europe is concerned.’m more positive about the United States of America, because the culture there is different; the people are very ambitious, very agile, flexible and aggressive. They want to do something different all the time and they like to be innovative. Most of the senior people there would like to have a dual career; which means that if they are doing a finance job, then they will go and study marketing; if they are doing engineering, they will go and learn management.

Everyone is so worried, so insecure about their job that they want to do dual career planning – and this means that they will always find something to do in their life and the US will come out of this crisis much earlier.

In contrast to G-7 and developed economies, the situation in the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) has reversed quickly and they are all on the way to growth. Clearly, these economies have a strong domestic demand and are not much leveraged.

To sum up, we are at a phase where the West is going to take a long time to bring its house in order; they will grow less in the process, but the emerging markets will continue to grow.

We all know that India is expected to grow at 7 to 8%, but I think this is on the conservative side; India should really be targeting 10% growth for many years. China will continue to maintain growth at 9%.

Today, the US GDP is four times larger than that of China but we all know that by 2027 China will surpass the USA. The US GDP is $12 trillion, China $3 trillion. But in 20 years we will see China multiplying its GDP four times.

In fact, China is producing oneIndonesia every year. And every five years it is producing one UnitedKingdom. Look at the size of theeconomy, look at the way they aregrowing… it’s remarkable growth.

Where do we place AreclorMittal in this? When we merged in 2006, we had outlined a few strategies. The first was to grow; second, to maintain market share in the developed world; and third, vertically integrating the outcome.

The crisis of 2009 basically reinforced our strategy of 2006. We believe that what we had planned in 2006 was the right strategy for our company to grow, though we had to give a pause in 2009, but now we have started to work on our growth projects, especially in India.

Personally, I am very excited about India. My media friends are always asking me, what’s happening in Karnataka, what’s happening in Jharkhand, in Orissa? I really don’t know what’s happening there. I wish I could give them the correct answer, but there are always different dimensions to my answer.

They are making progress, but it is not satisfying to me or to my company. Hopefully, some day we will start the work on the ground, whether in Karnataka, Orissa, Jharkhand or Maharashtra. I don’t know where, but we are determined to start working.

At the same time, we have a joint venture oil refinery in Bhathinda in Punjab with HPCL. I am very happy that it is making good progress. It’s a project of Rs. 18,000 to Rs. 19,000 crores; we are on time and we are on budget.

There is a clear contrast here; it means that things do get done. Iam not a pessimist and I believethat things can be done.

What does this mean for the future? While it is true that India has survived this crisis very well and we have a great opportunity for many years, we should not think that we are winners. There is much to do.

Let’s not forget that the global crisis has partly to do with shortcomings in governance. The financial world did lose a sense of responsibility. I believe that strong corporate governance and transparency is important for our country and will always remain important.

I believe that leaders in business, in society and in politics have a key role to play in shaping and strengthening governance. It’s not SEBI which has to rule on corporate governance, but all of us have to work together for shaping and strengthening our corporate governance.

At the same time, it is important to build systems and processes which are efficient. We cannot do anything in an unstructured manner. Just as banks, corporates and companies have risk management, there should be an independent body for risk management processes.

Further, with a development plan of $1.3 trillion, India needs to develop human resources, skills and education. At the Prime Minister’s advisory committee meeting in Delhi last week, this point did come up – that there is a need to work on education and to improve skill-sets.

And we have to be cost-competitive. People say that India is cheap, labour is cheap and cost is cheap. But don’t forget that the Indian rupee has appreciated (against the dollar) from Rs. 52 to Rs. 44. If we continue to have this kind of foreign exchange coming in, then it could end up at Rs. 40 by the end of the year, or maybe next year. Then, the currency arbitrage will go away. Therefore, we have to be really cost-competitive in terms of productivity, in terms of technology, management and systems.

As Rotarians we have to do a lot of work to eliminate poverty. We are all doing fine, but if we scratch the surface and see closely, I think the ground reality is very sad and tragic.

We are not prepared for an earthquake; we are not prepared forunforeseen situations, because everyone’s trajectory is only growth. But we have to really work oneliminating poverty from the coreof our heart.

Our health system has to improve; we have to be healthy.

My last point, which I came across just yesterday… I was very impressed with the initiative that US President Obama has taken to improve things. (You can read the White House blog.) He invited a few smart business people and IT experts to advise the White House on how they can improve, how they can “serve their customers” better.

If the government can think of how to become more modern and efficient, I think we should also think, as corporate leaders or in our professions, how do we serve our customers better?

Changes are not easy to bring about. Many years of collective will are necessary to make changes… and this where organisations like Rotary come into play. You have made a lot of contributions to your business and to society and you have taken an oath (I have also taken the oath). You understand issues, you undertake positive actions and you have immense potential to bring about these changes.

Question-Answer session

Shailesh Haribhakti: The Chinese are reported to have commented that India is not a strong competitor. And I have discovered that they are saying it with good reason. Even in our traditional area of strength like software, we find that in terms of a few components the Chinese have taken a sustainable cost advantage over us. Unless we take up what is called second-generation outsourcing (which means looking at where the lowest cost components are available anywhere in the world), we will not be able to sustain our competitiveness. What do you think about this?

Secondly, after Copenhagen, the world is left with virtually nothing except strong voluntariness. What role would that play in action for climate change?

Mr. Mittal: We discuss China every day. I have not seen any meeting, whether social, political or business, where the China issue is not discussed.

And I am glad that for the lastone and a half years I am seeingchange – and that people are alsotalking about India.

There is a change but China is clearly a threat from the point of view of cost, of technology and of scale. They are building mega capacities for everything, whether it is steel, aluminium, helicopters, IT, anything.

If you go to any of the Chinese provinces like I do, they only talk about technology. “What technology will you give us? What global management will you teach us? We don’t need money. We only need your technology.”

At the same time, Chinese workers work 100 hours per week.

I can give you many examples which are more threatening, so we have to be clear… we cannot copy China, (just as) we never could copy Japan. We have to create our own business model which will create cost competitiveness for us and which has to be based on domestic demand. The way we are moving, we are going to see more protectionism in the world, everyone is going to protect their turf. Therefore, we need a business model that is sustainable.

In China all the plants are as efficient in terms of productivity as many of the European plants. It is a clear threat and one cannot undermine it…

I do not have the solution. I can only say that our plants must be most cost-competitive, they must be ahead It was almost like rush hour at the Metro. Ever in technology and they should con-walked into the Rooftop room of the Trident (Ober tinue to produce the best products. January 21. Here is one section of the gathering

As for climate change, it is a global issue. But global leaders sitting in Copenhagen could not come to any conclusion.

I will tell you an interesting anecdote. I spoke to a lot of leaders after the Copenhagen meeting… and (they told me that) the developed world wanted to sign a document which said that by 2050, 80% of the CO2 emissions would be cut. The developed world was ready to sign, but the Chinese did not agree. Why? because by 2050 they would be the developed world and they would have to cut emissions by 80%!

We have to re-think China. It’s a very different country, it’s no more a developing, emerging market. It has a 20-year plan, a 30-year plan, a 40year plan… so it will always be a threat to everyone.

S.K. Mitra: You expressed frustration over your projects in India. Have you looked at acquisitions in India? It could be easier than setting up new projects. Secondly, when you cut your production by 50%, what kind of layoffs were involved?

Mr. Mittal: There are no acquisition opportunities for us in India because Indian entrepreneurs are great. They have their ambitions, they have their own business plans which they want to execute; we have never really thought of acquisition because it is not do-able.

What do I say about layoffs? I will try to summarise. It was a very brave exercise to operate at 50%. We have so many different facilities; for example, we have more than 50 blast furnaces in different countries; therefore, based on different countries’ requirements we shut them down; contract workers in some of the companies were laid off immediately. We retired some people ahead of time.

In some countries we could go for short working hours; instead of 40

hours, we worked for 20. Even in my London office we cut salaries by 10%, going up to 15% in senior management. And we reduced our working hours to four in London.

There were a lot of actions and a lot of people were asked to sacrifice. And this is the culmination of all those sacrifices and layoffs.

(Dr.) Indu Shahani:You are aware that 50% of India’s population is under the age of 25. If we want these demographics to be a dividend and not a disaster, we have to expand the education space. We have only 330 universities but we need at least 1,000 if we want to reach the access rate figure of 20% (access to higher education). The sector needs to be opened up and more investment is needed. What are your views and investment plans to help the demographics become a dividend?

Mr. Mittal: You’re right, we are not working for the next generation, we’re only giving them burdens. We have to work not only on education but we have to work on health and on the quality of life. We have to give them some hope for the future.

You said we have 330 universities, but if you look at the quality of education, more than half of them are not eligible to remain operational. We have to look not only for volume but for quality. And that, I think, should be the priority, not just getting more universities and to continue creating numbers. If we do not improve the quality of education, it’s going to be much more difficult…

What are we doing? We have the ArcelorMittal Foundation, we have a family trust… my wife, for example, has sponsored the Usha Mittal Institute of Technology for Women in Juhu. We have sponsored and are building universities in Jaipur but it is not enough. There is so much need and so much to do. I don’t know what’s the solution… but the quality of education is very important.

When I interact with some of the graduates, it’s very sad; some of the

B.E. engineering graduates… verysad.

Dr. Swati Piramal: Talking of industry and technology, in India we spend less than 1% on R&D. How do you connect these two, innovation and technology? The scientist goes in one direction and industry in the other, and never the twain shall meet. Do you have any suggestions on how we can use technology as you mentioned about China?

Mr. Mittal: I was talking recently to a group of business people and I said that technology cannot be focused only in Europe or in America, it has to be localised in different countries. I think Europeans and westerners tend to agree with this. Thus there is an opportunity to tie up with some of the leading R&D facilities related to our business and to add value to what they are doing.

But the real fear is that there is no good patent protection.

When we have joint ventures inChina, my biggest fear is that ourtechnology will be pilfered. Evenour joint venture partners, whenthey come to our offices… we havecaught them hacking into our computer system!

There is a real threat and within ArcelorMittal we have changed our R&D to be more business-driven rather than technology-driven. Each segment of our business is a customer to our R&D because we charge them for providing R&D and knowledge; if the customer does not accept (paying) that fee because he does not see justification, then our R&D does not move forward in that particular process.

Customer-oriented technology will bring about results and will add value to what you are doing. Otherwise, I will be working on a different island and business will be operating on a different one.

PP Kalpana Munshi: Can you suggest three policy recommendations for government to implement which can bring the country in the front rank of the global firmament?

Secondly, we would like to know the strategy adopted by your company globally on CSR and climate change for global warming. Should CSR be a part of business policy?

Mr. Mittal: CSR is a very strong pillar of our strategy. We are working on employees, on society, on governance. At this time we have 360 CSR projects going on under the ArcelorMittal Foundation in different countries. There is a dedicated team working on different projects with the local management in different societies and communities. Even our top managers give a couple of hours and volunteer to be part of CSR.

On climate change, we are doing as much as anyone… we are the benchmark for the industry and we continue to invest on new research and development processes for reducing our CO2 emissions. Last week I was with President Sarkozy of France; we are working with the French and the German governments on a new $500 million carbon capture and storage programme.

This is an issue we have been discussing with the steel industry in different countries. The CO2 emissions of different countries range from 2.5 tonnes to 5 tonnes per tonne of steel produced, whereas the benchmark is

2.5 tonnes or 2.2 tonnes. There is a lot of work that the steel industry has to do.

Talking about the government, I just spoke of the White House blog; there 20 suggestions given by different businessmen to the government. I have marked five which are applicable to the Indian government. I am sure if all of you read them and have a discussion in one of your Rotary Club meetings, perhaps you could decide on a few and write to the Indian government.

Anuj Arenja: You focused on one industry, steel, whereas most Indian business houses have diversified. What is your advice to budding entrepreneurs (between focusing on one industry and diversification)?

Secondly, how did your business work style change when your son joined you in business?

Mr. Mittal: I love my children and I love my son a lot, so I will answer that question first.

I was interviewed by a journalistin December, 1997; at that time myson was still studying in Wharton.This lady asked me, when your soncomes back from university, will hefollow your footsteps? And I answered by saying, “I’ll follow his”(footsteps) because he comes froma new generation, with new knowledge, with new vision. And it is better to listen to the new generation.

Our relations are great, we complement each other and we have a very professional relationship. In an office environment we treat each other like other professionals treat each other. We have agreements, disagreements, debates, discussions. But in the company, once a decision is arrived at everyone stands by it. He has his responsibilities; he is doing a great job and I am very proud of him and what he is doing.

I think that if we follow some of the principles which I stated, such as willingness to change and willingness to understand the other side, to work as a team, then any person can work with anyone, whether father-son, father-daughter, or brothers. Problems come up when we are not willing to change, adapt and be flexible.

As for your first question, India is in a growth phase, it is a growing country and offers enormous opportunities in different segments. And if you are an entrepreneur, you would like to tap everything. This is the business model; you could be in power, you could be in steel, in chemicals, in anything, in cement, aluminium, joint ventures abroad... small works in this environment.

Personally, I believe that in a global environment focus on a core business creates more value. I had tried for a couple of years to get into different businesses but I could not add the value which I could do by focusing on our core business.

Burjor Poonawala: It is almost always difficult to earn your first million (I mean dollars, not rupees). Can you share that experience with us?

Mr. Mittal: I was asked this question two years back at a Goldman Sachs conference.

I told them that I earned my firstmillion dollars in 1980, that was the best moment of my life and ithas still not been repeated.

Visiting Rotarian: I was very happy to hear that you are happy with the Bhathinda plant. I’m happy to tell you that my company is supplying the main reactor and the regenerator for your plant. We are the users of the steel produced by you and various other plants. Where do you see the steel price towards the end of this year?

Mr. Mittal: First of all, thank you for supplying the reactor to our plant. I hope it is going to be on time and that it produces what we have paid for!

As for steel prices, had I known steel prices, I would make much more money than I do.

A mediaperson: You are in talks with Australia’s largest mining company for a partnership. Can you throw any light on that?

Mr. Mittal: If we do something, you will read (about) it in the newspapers.

Earlier, Mr. Adi Godrej, also an Honorary member of the Club, said while introducing the guest speaker that Mr. Mittal and the Indian Information Technology (IT) industry had created a positive global mindset about India.

“India’s image as an entrepreneurial, technologically savvy and economically successful nation owes a lot to the duo. In a very short period of time

– less than half a generation – he has built the world’s largest steel business; this is a tremendous effort, a tremendous achievement, by a tremendous Indian,” Mr. Godrej stated.

The vote of thanks was proposed by President Nandan Damani who thanked Mr. Mittal for flying all the way from London to address the Club. The members present gave a standing ovation to Mr. Mittal.