COLD STEEL is the gripping story of the world’s biggest and most hard-fought industry takeover of recent years, an epic corporate battle that would send shockwaves through the political corridors of Europe, excite the world’s financial markets, enrich thirty hedge funds and transform the global steel industry.
In 2006, the two largest steel-producers went head to head in a bitter battle for total market domination. Lakshmi Mittal, a Calcutta-born industrialist who had raised himself up from humble beginnings to become the world’s fourth-richest man, proposes a friendly merger with rival Arcelor, a pan-European company whose interested parties include the governments of Spain, Luxembourg and Belgium. Arcelor’s mercurial CEO, Frenchman Guy Dolle, firmly refuses, and the scene is set for a massive hostile takeover involving billions of dollars of finance, government and shareholder manoeuvring, and accusations of jingoism and double-dealing. Fast-paced and electrifying, COLD STEEL brings to life the cut and thrust of big business at war.
- ‘A rare, insider's account of lots of people making millions… The book reads like a thriller, with each side trying to rope in other steel companies on both sides of the Atlantic as allies… As this book shows, money and business logic prevailed in the end over politics and protection.’ The Economist
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Published 17/04/2008