The son of a steel company founder, a then-26-year-old Lakshmi Mittal started his own steel mill in Indonesia in 1976 after his native India restricted domestic steel production.
Mittal would go on to buy struggling steel mills around the world, creating the world s largest steelmaker that at one point single-handedly produced a tenth of the world s steel. He founded ArcelorMittal, a multinational giant with operations in 60 countries and customers in 160 countries.
One of the world s richest people, he shaped the steel industry in the Region and the world. His Luxembourg-based company consolidated many of the steel mills along Northwest Indiana s lakeshore under the ArcelorMittal banner in the mid-2000s. That came after an import crisis wiped out much of the American steel industry, resulting in the consolidation of long-running companies like Inland Steel, Bethlehem Steel and LTV.