Press Trust of India / London Feb 24, 2009, 17:55 IST
After creating the world's biggest steel empire mostly through merger and acquisitions, NRI billionaire Lakshmi Mittal has decided to apply brakes on his takeover drive as a fallout of the global economic slowdown.
ArcelorMittal is the world's single steel company to have attained a size of over 100 billion dollars and most of the credit goes to its numerous merger and acquisition deals.
However, to tackle the changing market conditions, the company in a regulatory filing said, it is now "curtailing merger and acquisition activity".
In May 2008 ArcelorMittal, whose CFO and Lakshmi Mittal's son Aditya used to have an 80-page folder listing hundreds of potential M&A targets, had received shareholders' approval for expanding its equity capital to meet the firm's future M&A requirements.
The company's plans to go slow on M&As comes in sharp contrast to its earlier stated position of continuously being on the look-out for potential opportunities.
At an Extraordinary General Meeting on May 13, 2008, the shareholders had authorised the board to raise the company's share capital, so that it is in a position to issue shares for entering into potential growth opportunities such as M&As.
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