Company Overview

Mittal Steel’s $41 billion acquisition of rival Arcelor in 2006 made the company the world’s number-one steel company, and its share price rose 90 percent in the year following the deal. The company is three times the size of its nearest competitor, and maintains a headquarters in Luxembourg; corporate offices in London, Rotterdam, Paris, and Madrid; and a presence in 60 countries. The company’s growth has been global from the time CEO Lakshmi Mittal inherited his family’s steel business, which was based in India. Finding the country’s regulations unsuitable for growth, he moved the company to Indonesia, where it prospered. Later, it acquired Trinidad’s state-owned steel industry; expanded into Mexico; purchased U.S. steel companies Inland Steel and International Steel; and bought some state-owned steel firms in Eastern Europe. In recent years, the company has focused its efforts on Asia, primarily China and India, where growth and development are occurring at lightening speed. Steel consumption in India is expected to rise from 43 to 100 million tons by 2020. Workers, too, are plentiful in these countries. The number of engineering graduates each year in India is 350,000, compared with only 70,000 in the U.S. and 100,000 in Europe. Though revenues are soaring at ArcelorMittal, morale is not consistently as high. With expansion comes a growing responsibility for worker health and safety. In the fall of 2007, a feature article on Kazakh women miners appeared alongside a brief article on worker safety in the ArcelorMittal company magazine boldspirit. It was cruel irony, then, that in January 2008, 30 workers were killed in a blast at the Abaiskaya mine in central Kazakhstan. An explosion at another mine owned by ArcelorMittal in the same region killed 43 workers in 2006. The Abaiskaya tragedy occurred even as ArcelorMittal, to its credit, had procured a $100 million loan to modernize these mines.