Allen Solly, Louis Philippe, Peter England, Pantaloons, Ralph Lauren-Everybody’s heard about these high profile Brands and all of them are owned by one big Indian national conglomerate, Aditya Birla Group. This group is active in 14 industry sectors and has achieved global and national leadership in several businesses.
The Aditya Birla Group was founded in the 1960s by Aditya Birla, who started building his business empire at the age of 24. By then, however, the Birla family had been one of India's most prominent industrial and financial families for nearly a century. The origins of the Birla family fortunes lay in the second half of the 19th century, when in 1870 Seth Shiv Narayan Birla launched a cotton- and jute-trading business in the town of Pilani, in Rajasthan. The next phase of the family's success came at the beginning of the 20th century, when Birla's grandson Ghanshyamdas took over as head of the family fortune. The younger Birla led the family into the industrial sector, setting up a jute mill in 1919. With independence, Birla began developing his industrial empire in earnest. The Birla group's expansion continued through the 1980s and mid 2000s. It is now a major player in the market and has left no sector untouched.
Personally, Vodafone and Pantaloons are two of the brands that are closest to my heart. Right since my childhood, I’ve always bought clothes from Pantaloons and there was this one time when I used to live in Madurai and there wasn’t a Pantaloons showroom there. So every year when I visited Chennai, I used to buy one year’s worth of clothes and I’m the only person in my family to use a Vodafone connection and it all started with the love of those cute pugs in the advertisements!