6. Cold Steel by Tim Bouquet and Byron Ousey

This is the story of one of the nastier hostile take over battles in European corporate history when the Indian ex-pat owned Mittal Steel made a hostile bid for the Luxembourg based Arcelor Steel. The saga began in earnest after Guy Dolle, the President of Arcelor, received the following phone call from Lakshmi Mittal, the CEO of Mittal:

This is Lakshmi Mittal. As a matter of courtesy I am calling to tell you that tomorrow I will mount a public offer to your shareholders to take over your company.

Mittal Steel was established in the late 1970s when Lakshmi Mittal purchased an under appreciated steel mill in Indonesia and set about modernizing the facility and increasing its output. With that business prospering, Mittal assembled the largest steel producer in the world by purchasing steel mills throughout the world. He bought facilities in the US, the Caribbean, the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. In just over 20 years he became one of the richest men in the world from basically nothing.

Arcelor, in contrast, was a hundred plus year old company which was the product of the merger of the largest French, Spanish and Luxembourg steel producers. It was run like many pseudo state run companies in continental Europe as a partnership between its unions, its management, its shareholders and various governments.

I think what makes this story interesting is the clash of cultures: the brash entrepreneurial culture of the Mittal group versus the staid bureaucratic culture of the Arcelor managers. From the start, the Arcelor managers played this battle incorrectly. In one of their first press conferences, and in one of the most stunning demonstrations of French racism, the head of Arcelor described the Mittal bid as follows:

Mittal's offer consists, if you will excuse the expression, of monkey money.

He then went on to describe how it would be wrong for Arcelor, such an icon of European industry, to be managed by Indians.

Six months later, after having thrown everything including the kitchen sink at Mittal's offer, the Arcelor board of directors relented and allowed the company to be acquired by Mittal Steel. The subsequent years have shown all of Arcelor's and the European's fears to be unfounded. The combined company is known as ArcelorMittal, it is based in Luxembourg and it employs tens of thousands more people in Europe than it did before the take over.

This was a great, fast story.