Anil Agarwal on M&A / Acquisitions

Sterlite became India's first private-sector copper smelter and refinery in 1993, then in 1995 acquired the long-shut Madras Aluminium from BIFR. The expansion was driven by a simple insight: cable margins were hostage to copper and aluminum prices, so Agarwal decided to manufacture the metals himself rather than buy them — a textbook vertical integration thesis.

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.

Vedanta expanded geographically throughout the 2000s: Konkola Copper Mines in Zambia (2004), a controlling stake in Sesa Goa iron ore (2007), Anglo American's zinc assets in Namibia, Ireland and South Africa (2010), and Cairn India — India's largest private-sector oil producer — in 2011. Sesa Goa and Sterlite were merged in 2012 to consolidate group structure.

In October 2017 Volcan Holdings Plc, Agarwal's personal vehicle, took a 19% stake in Anglo American, making him the mining major's largest shareholder — a quiet move that surprised the market and signaled Agarwal's ambition to engage with global mining incumbents rather than just compete with them.

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.

Agarwal attributed his global breakthrough to a single Tasmanian acquisition: the management of a copper mine had speculated in the metals market and gone bust, and he rushed to Tasmania to buy the mine for $2.5 million. It has since returned roughly $100 million a year. Other early overseas picks included a small Queensland mine and a gold mine in Armenia — opportunistic bets made under India's then-tight foreign-exchange rules.