When India was recovering and growing after Independence, Aditya Birla was working towards growing his business empire in 1960s. The seeds of Birla were sown by Shiv Narayan Birla in 1870. By depicting steady growth for more than a century, the Aditya Birla Group has turned into top conglomerates of the world with businesses in multiple industries in multiple countries. The conglomerate today is a Fortune 500 company with a worth of approximately US$44.3 billion.
Aditya Birla Group has a vision which says ‘To be a premium global conglomerate with a clear focus on each business’. They aim to achieve the vision through their mission of delivering superior value to their customers, shareholders, employees and society. The conglomerate operates across 5 continents. It has businesses amongst various sectors including Metal, Cement, Telecom, Financial Service, Textiles, Fashion and Retail, Carbon Black, Chemicals, Insulators, Agri-Business and Mining.
On global basis, the group is largest aluminum rolling company. The group is also the top producer of Carbon Black. It is named under the world’s largest aluminum recycler. It is also listed as top 5 producers of insulators and acrylic fiber. In India, the group also counts as the largest in fashion retail, white cement, leading telecom player as well as agri-solution provider. The picture clearly tells the story of growth and success achieved in diverse business lines.
In our personal daily life, the group has become a part from daily clothing brands like Pantaloons to the raw material used in form of cement to build the houses we live in.
There’s a famous quote which says that “Success is not final, and failure is not fatal. All that drives is the courage to continue that counts”. I believe that there’s no life that can achieve all the goals the easy way. Everyone has an untold story to tell which has either led to failure or success. At the end, the one who keeps moving forward, makes it to the goal.
One such prominent instance of my life I would like to share would be the one during my final year of graduation. When everyone was living their final year of Engineering, I had to go through financial crisis which originated due to unexpected family exigencies. The situation was tough and there were two clear ways where one was to do something to ease the financial situation by generating income streams and the second one was to go for finance options to continue my studies.
I decided to try the first option and generate the income stream. The rolling mills business was going down because big corporates had setup their own machines and stopped procuring the raw material from market. I helped my family finding solutions to the slowdown in business by advising to target the clients that couldn’t afford the rolling machines themselves. Also, some states like Goa had big clientele who still procured material from outside due to high demand of their products.
Apart from this, we also started other small income streams by investing in retail business for clothing and food products.
After all, it’s about how many you can take and still keep moving forward.