Behind every billionaire there is a story!

India finishes the year of the billionaires

India’s growth story of the last 15 years is well known and well recorded. Each of those 15 years has its own stories to tell. This year, 2007, which will come to an end in a couple of days, will stand out in the history books for several reasons. It is the year when Indian business truly entered the big league. It is also the year the unthinkable happened. The Sensex breached the 20000 mark. Says Naazneen Karmali, who puts together the list of Indian billionaires for the Forbes magazine, “This year thank to the stock market India is breeding billionaires like rabbits!”The year began with a bang with the Tata Steel-Corus deal. It was a real coup when the Indian group took over the Corus group, the ninth largest steel producing company in the world, having a capacity of 19 million tones. What started out as a friendly bid erupted into a full-blooded corporate war which ended in a decisive victory for the Tatas on the last day of January this year. To quote from a business publication, “A relatively small company with 100 years’ existence and ranked 58 by production in 2005, having a consolidated turnover of a little under Rs 20,500 crore bid for a UK registered company four times its size, staved off competition from a resource rich Brazilian company (CSN) and finally wrested the assets by making an aggressive bid, offering 608 pence a share for acquiring the outstanding 1.01 billion outstanding shares.”

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