His father died suddenly in 1995 and Kumar Mangalam Birla, aged 28, took charge of the Aditya Birla Group. What he inherited was respected, profitable and thoroughly traditional. He set about making it neither traditional nor Indian-only.

Aluminium. Cement. Chemicals, fashion retail, financial services, telecom. The group now runs across dozens of countries, and much of that came through acquisitions large enough to make a board uncomfortable — which was rather the point.

He inherited a legacy and had to prove, quickly, that he could grow it rather than merely guard it.

He professionalised the management, pushed the global ambition, and picked capital-intensive industries where scale and execution decide everything. Telecom put him in the middle of the most brutally competitive market in India — a business that has destroyed better-capitalised operators.

Carrying a century-old family name while running a modern multinational is an awkward inheritance. Birla resolved it by choosing expansion over preservation, which is how a custodian becomes an industrialist in his own right.

Birla is a chartered accountant and took an MBA at the London Business School. He is the fourth generation of a business family whose standing goes back to G. D. Birla, one of the leading industrialists of the independence era. On taking over he brought the group's scattered companies under a single brand and, unusually for an Indian family business at the time, recruited senior managers from multinationals.

The defining deals were overseas. Hindalco bought the Canadian aluminium maker Novelis in 2007 for about six billion dollars, then one of the largest foreign acquisitions by an Indian company. UltraTech, the group's cement arm, became India's largest cement producer through a series of purchases, including Larsen & Toubro's cement business and later plants from Jaiprakash Associates.

Telecom has been the hardest chapter. Idea Cellular merged with Vodafone's Indian business in 2018 to form Vodafone Idea, which then struggled under heavy debt and court-mandated dues after Jio's entry upended pricing. Birla stepped down as its non-executive chairman in 2021. The group has since entered paints, launching the Birla Opus brand in 2024, and jewellery retail, a clear push towards consumer markets.