The business story
Anil Agarwal built Vedanta, one of India's largest natural-resources groups, almost entirely by buying things other people were ready to sell. Over five decades he moved from trading scrap metal to owning smelters, mines and an oil business, and in May 2026 he split the group into five separately listed companies. His record is one of the clearest examples of an acquisition-led industrial strategy, including its costs.
His method is consistent.
Before Vedanta
Agarwal was born in Patna, Bihar, in 1954, into a Marwari family. His father ran a small workshop making aluminium conductors. Agarwal did not attend university; he joined the family shop as a teenager and, at 19, left for Bombay.
His first business there was scrap, mainly old telephone cable bought from suppliers in other states and resold in the city. It was low-margin trading with long journeys and no ownership stake, but it gave him a ground-level view of how metal moved through the Indian economy: who held surplus, who mispriced it, who was short of working capital. He has described those years as his real business education.
Building Vedanta
In 1976 he used a bank loan to buy a small enamelled-copper maker, his shift from trader to operator. In 1986 he founded Sterlite Industries to make jelly-filled telephone cables, which became the cash engine for later deals. Through the 1990s Sterlite added an aluminium smelter in Tamil Nadu and a copper smelter at Tuticorin.
The turning point came with government disinvestment. Sterlite bought 51 per cent of BALCO in 2001 and 26 per cent of Hindustan Zinc in 2002, together for roughly ₹1,000 crore. Both deals faced strikes, audit questions and long litigation, but the assets proved worth many times their price. In December 2003 Vedanta Resources became the first Indian company listed on the London Stock Exchange main board.
Further expansion followed: Sesa Goa in 2007, Konkola Copper Mines in Zambia, and Cairn India for about $8.7 billion, closing in 2011. Setbacks were serious. Thirteen people died when police fired on protesters at Tuticorin in 2018, and the smelter remains shut. Tribal village councils rejected bauxite mining at Niyamgiri in 2013. Zambia moved to seize Konkola in 2019. Debt at the parent became a recurring strain, which the article identifies as the practical reason for the 2026 demerger into aluminium, oil and gas, power, iron and steel, and a residual base-metals company.
