Will Steel Become Mittal?

Will Steel Become Mittal? It is every businessperson’s dream that his or her brand name becomes synonymous with the product or industry in general. If I asked you to pass me a Kleenex, you would know that I am asking for a paper napkin. Colgate means toothpaste, Cadburys means chocolate, and to Xerox means to photocopy. A step further would be to have some dictionary officially accept one’s brand name for inclusion in their latest edition as a verb, a noun, or an adjective, even if that dictionary is called ‘The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English.’ Recently we heard of Google gaining this distinction. Any one wanting to know what it means to Google can now look up the Webster’s dictionary and get enlightened instantly. Not just businesses, but just about any brand-able stuff can reach these lofty heights of recognition. Take the city of Bangalore. Already perched about 3021 feet above sea level, it was elevated to a very different level when the Oxford dictionary listed bangalored as an adjective. Several decades ago, the port city of Shanghai gained notoriety as a place where unscrupulous captains picked lonely men off the streets, got them senselessly drunk, and forcibly conscripted them to work as sailors, usually with little or no pay. Since then, shanghaied is a word found in most dictionaries, meaning to get tricked, or kidnapped. Today’s Shanghai is a very modern city, and very different from those old, dark days. The modern Shanghai is so inspiring that the authorities of Bombay wanted to transform their own city into another Shanghai. Alas, the only things being shanghaied in Bombay are the dreams and aspirations of its poor working class. Getting bangalored is, however, not at all like getting shanghaied. If you get a call from a friend saying that he just got bangalored, he is only trying to tell you that he has been relocated to India. This, I think, would be a good thing to happen to a friend. Wouldn’t it be nice to have your salary in Dollars and your cost-of-living in Rupees? However, sometimes the friend’s company gets Bangalored. That would be good for India, but not so good for the friend who gets left behind in the original Silicon Valley, suddenly jobless. Of course, I would then suggest to my friend that he folds up his laptop and buys a one-way ticket to India, where jobs are a plenty. In fact, so many NRIs (Non Resident Indians) have been coming back lately, looking for opportunities in India, that the acronym has been given new meanings like Newly Returned Indians and Not Required Indians! One such famous NRI who recently came looking for opportunities in India was Lakshmi Nivas Mittal. In spite of his immense wealth, and having lived outside India for decades, he still carries his Indian passport, and is proud to be an Indian. The same feeling was reciprocated by his country when Mittal was successful in his bid to purchase the European steel giant Arcelor. India, too, was proud of this Indian. With this acquisition, Mittal becomes the king of steel: three times as big as his nearest rival is. Not bad at all for a fifty six year old, who was born in a village that had no electricity until 1960. Mittal’s solid steel mettle finally got him what he wished for. Never mind what the investment analysts predict about the future prospects of this giant merger. Will the synergies of the two companies match? Will the insults doled out by Dollé (Arcelor CEO Guy Dollé), that Mittal’s products were like cheap “eau-de-cologne” in comparison with Arcelor’s “perfume” be forgiven and forgotten? Will the deal create additional value for Mittal shareholders? At $33.3bn, and 31% cash, did Mittal overpay?

For Mittal, this is not the time to worry about such nitty-gritties. He is basking in his glory, and I am sure he would refer all the worrying analysts to a Hindi movie he must have watched several times in his younger days. In that movie, Amitabh Bachchan strikes a deal with Sanjeev Kumar to buy a plot of land and apparently pays a high price. Later when Kumar tells Bachchan that he will not make a good businessman because he overpaid for the plot, Bachchan replies that, in fact, Kumar was not a good businessman because he underestimated Bachchan’s resolve to own the plot. Kumar could have demanded, and Bachchan would have paid, a much higher amount. I would have thought that the world’s third richest man would take a break and go on a mega-holiday or something to celebrate his mega-deal. Silly me; I forgot that holidays, breaks, weekends are all sort of an opiate specifically designed for the salaried working class. A true businessman never rests. Mittal has been as busy as ever, meeting prime ministers, chief ministers, finance ministers, and other such VIPs. The world is watching to see where his expanding busy-ness will take him next. At present, there are on this planet only two people wealthier than him, and one of them is nearly seventy-six years old. As we wait to see if there will be any surprises in the next Forbes listing of the world’s richest, it would come as no surprise to see some dictionary, somewhere listing Mittal as a noun. After having known steel to be a metal for so long, will the world get used to calling it Mittal?

K. Y. Philip is a Mechanical Engineer from IIT-Bombay, working in Riyadh and longing to be Bangalored.