LONDON, June 26: The Arcelor-Mittal mega merger is the latest tactical masterstroke from steel sector king Lakshmi Mittal, the Indian-born billionaire whose metals empire has rapidly expanded across the globe.

In a rags to riches story, Mittal built the world's biggest steelmaking company in Mittal Steel after initially working for his father's steel business in northern India during the 1970s.

His latest business coup was to clinch a 27-billion-euro ($34-billion) merger deal with Arcelor on Sunday after an epic five-month power play that saw the European steelmaker narrowly avoid merging with Russian peer Severstal.

Mittal has built his success on carefully-judged acquisitions, and is mainly active in Eastern Europe and North America. The merger with Arcelor gives his group key operations in Western Europe and Latin America.

Arcelor-Mittal, as the new company will be known, will be the first global metals giant capable of annually producing more than 100 tons of steel, which is used particularly by the automotive and construction industries. That output will dwarf the production of Mittal's nearest competitor, Nippon Steel of Japan.

Mittal Steel was already the world's biggest steel company but the merger will strengthen the group's dominant position in the sector, which has enjoyed soaring demand from the emerging powerhouse economies of India and China.

London resident Lakshmi Mittal -- Britain's richest man -- must now pay Severstal a break-fee of 130 million euros because the deal trumps the Russian company's previously-agreed 15.3-billion-dollar tie-up with Arcelor.

The Mittal Steel founder and chairman, who is 56 years old, began forging his career in the industry in the early 1970s when he worked for his father's company in the Rajasthan desert in northern India.

In 1976, the Mittal family emigrated to Indonesia, where Lakshmi Mittal started Ispat Indo. He had one of his most notable successes in the late 1980s when he turned around a loss-making government-founded steel firm in Trinidad and Tobago.

The LNM Group, an international steelmaking association controlled by Mittal, now has over 135,000 employees at its steelmaking operations in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Trinidad, Germany, France, Kazakhstan, Algeria, Poland, Romania, Czech Republic, South Africa and Indonesia.

In 2004, Mittal engineered the merger of his two companies, Ispat International and LMN Holdings, with the US-based International Steel Group, to form Mittal Steel.

And since January he has been pursuing Arcelor in hopes of creating an even bigger global behemoth that will now control 10 per cent of the world steel market.

A British resident, who remains an Indian citizen, Mittal in April topped the Sunday Times Rich List, having amassed a fortune of 14.88 billion pounds (21.5 billion euros, $26.5 billion), according to the newspaper's estimates.

Also in 2004, Mittal bought a huge 12-bedroom mansion in the plush central London neighbourhood of Kensington. At 70 million pounds, it was reported to be the most expensive private residence in the world.

In 2005, Mittal was rated the world's fifth-richest man by the US business magazine Forbes. He lists his hobbies as swimming, yoga and golf.—AFP