Aditya Mittal launched the largest merger in steel industry history late last January, a few days after his 30th birthday. Following a bruising eight-month battle, which featured protectionist rumblings from various European governments and a vigorous (some said racist) defence by the senior management of Arcelor, the Luxembourg-based target company, he was named in August as CFO and head of operations in the Americas for the combined Arcelor Mittal. With pro forma revenue of about €55 billion last year, that makes it easily the largest steel company in the world.

For most people, the victory over Arcelor would be a career defining moment. But not for the man himself, who invariably is dubbed "the crown prince" and heir to the steel empire his father Lakshmi Mittal—the world's fifth richest man, according to Forbes magazine—has built over three decades. Mittal junior's defining moment came much earlier, when he had just turned 21, was less than a year out of university and was called to join the family firm sooner than he had expected.

The occasion was the initial public offering in 1997 of Ispat International, then the Mittal family's main operating company. (Ispat is Hindi for steel.) The financing was coming at a crucial phase, just as the company was revving up its strategy to lead a reluctant steel industry towards the global consolidation that it badly needed. In an industry notorious for destroying value, it was proving to be a tough story to sell to investors.

"I always knew I was going to join the family business, but it came quicker than I thought because of the IPO," Mittal recalls. "The company wasn't experienced at accessing the public markets and here I had just spent seven months at Credit Suisse First Boston, I had my education and I knew just what our investor base wanted." Any hint of arrogance is quickly defused with an ironic smile. Indeed, Mittal had graduated less than a year earlier from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton Business School, with a BSc in economics, then went through investment bank CSFB's three-month training programme in the summer, followed by four months in mergers and acquisitions—a little short of the qualifications usually required to lead a tough-sell IPO of nearly $1 billion.

The truth, as Mittal explains, was that the IPO was unceremoniously dumped on him. "The IPO was not going well at all. It was close to being cancelled. Then there was a review with all of the [Ispat operating unit] CEOs in New York. I remember very clearly that meeting. The IPO came up as an agenda item and there was a person who was senior to me in the team who suddenly said, 'Aditya will give the report on the IPO; he's managing it.' I was, like, 'What?' Needless to say, the report was very bad. I got up and said, 'We're having all these difficulties, the market is very weak and hopefully we'll make the timeline.' That was my report."

He went back to his hotel in a daze. "I was, like, 'Damn, now I'm the leader of this thing and it's going nowhere.' I was very depressed," he says. There was even a notice waiting for him at the hotel from the US Immigration and Naturalisation Service warning that he'd overstayed his visa.

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How to pull the deal out of the dumper? "It was a repackaging of the company and our strategy, simplifying the organisation structure and presenting a very credible story as to what we wanted to do, the whole consolidation business, the whole globalisation business." Mittal, his team and the IPO bankers, led by former colleagues at CSFB, as well as Donaldson Lufkin & Jenrette, took the story on the road, holding face-to-face meetings with over 200 prospective investors across the US and Europe.

By the time the big IPO lunch presentation was held that August, at the St Regis Hotel on New York's Central Park East, it was standing-room only in the ballroom and investors were clamouring for a piece of Ispat. Barron's, an investment magazine, quoted one attendee at the time, Michael Gambardella of JP Morgan: "Ispat is a compelling example of growth in a mature industry." It had generated the kind of buzz then reserved for technology stocks. The shares were priced at $27 each, at the top of an indicated range that was increased twice. The issue eventually raised $776m, the largest ever IPO for a steel company.

Even after the Arcelor triumph this year, Mittal still talks with evident pride about that IPO: "It was ten times oversubscribed— that was incredible for a steel company—and was named 'Equity Deal of the Year' by Institutional Investor magazine," he beams. Most important, the IPO process identified Ispat as the steel industry's "mould breaker" for investors, as CSFB industry analyst Jeremy Fletcher put it.

That early baptism of fire for Aditya Mittal, especially the lessons learned through endless direct communication with investors, laid the groundwork for this year's battle with Arcelor. At the time, it also showed everyone within the Mittal organi- sation that Lakshmi Mittal entrusted a great deal to, and expected a lot from, his son. "When I started at the company, in some sense I had an advantage because I was part of the family. In some sense I had a disadvantage because everyone was focused on what I would say, what I would do, whether I could live up to the challenge. [The IPO] was very important."

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