Kumar Mangalam Birla on Globalization

Birla took over as Aditya Birla Group chairman in 1995 at age 28 after his father Aditya Vikram Birla's death. Under his chairmanship the group's annual turnover climbed from $2 billion in 1995 to roughly $70 billion by mid-2026, with operations spanning 40 countries. The scale-up thesis combined global M&A, deep capacity additions and selective new-business bets.

In 2007 Hindalco acquired Atlanta-based Novelis Inc, then the world's leading producer of aluminum rolled products, in a landmark overseas deal. The acquisition marked Birla's most ambitious push to take an Indian metals business up the value chain into downstream rolled products for global automotive and aerospace markets.

Birla contrasted traditional command-and-control hierarchies, where information was power and seniority was measured in years, with what he saw as the unavoidable need to change because the business context had shifted. He kept the family legacy of values, trusteeship-based management and long-horizon thinking, but re-engineered the operating culture to be meritocratic — a multi-ethnic, multi-dimensional group of 136,000 people across 42 nationalities on six continents.