Vedanta Resources

Anil Agarwal (born 1954 in Patna, Bihar) founded and chairs Vedanta Resources, controlling it fully through Volcan Investments. Born into a Marwadi family, his father ran a small aluminum conductor business and Agarwal chose to skip university to make conductors himself, leaving Patna for Mumbai at age 19 to seek broader opportunity.

India's disinvestment program opened the door to two landmark acquisitions: BALCO (51% for Rs 551.50 crore in 2001) and Hindustan Zinc Limited (about 65% in 2002). Both were sleepy public-sector mining firms; Agarwal bought them cheap, modernized them, and turned HZL into the world's largest integrated zinc producer within two decades.

The official positioning also highlights Agarwal's reputation as the first Indian to list a business at the London Stock Exchange — a fact the company foregrounds in his profile — and his self-described founding ethos captured in the line 'You must dream to make your dreams come true,' which the corporate site uses as a tagline.

To tap international capital, Agarwal incorporated Vedanta Resources Plc in London in 2003, becoming the first Indian firm to list on the London Stock Exchange (December 10, 2003). The listing vehicle then became the group's parent through internal restructuring — an unusual inversion that placed India-heavy assets under a UK-listed holding company.

Agarwal dismissed Brexit risk to Vedanta, arguing that an independent UK with strong legal and trading infrastructure would remain a comfortable base for global business. His family, he noted, held British passports and had supported Brexit — a position that underscored his comfort with London as Vedanta's headquarters despite the group's asset base remaining overwhelmingly Indian.

The post-merger Cairn India-Vedanta entity was positioned as the world's fourth-largest natural resources company after BHP, Rio Tinto and Glencore. Agarwal noted that 78% of revenue came from India, the remainder from Zambia, South Africa and Namibia — a deliberately India-heavy portfolio that he argued would tilt further toward India after the planned investments.

The Hindustan Zinc turnaround is, in Agarwal's telling, the company's signature operational story. Acquired when reserves were estimated at five years and output at 150,000 tonnes of zinc annually, Vedanta installed top talent and lifted output roughly sevenfold to one million tonnes while extending reserves to 40 years — and added close to 1,000 tonnes of silver production from scratch.