Indian billionaire Kumar Mangalam Birla, who oversees the $46 billion Aditya Birla Group spread across 36 countries, is no longer keen to acquire any firm with a globally diversified supply chain as protectionism and the pandemic increasingly curb the movement of products and people.
“We wouldn’t look at a company or a business where you source in one corner of the world and sell in another corner of the world,” Birla told Haslinda Amin in an interview during the Qatar Economic Forum. “That’s a reset that has happened on account of growing protectionism.”
Acquisitive conglomerates such as the one Birla helms — he has acquired more than 40 companies in the last 25 years — are now pivoting toward creating regional strongholds that can avoid getting tripped up in an increasingly divided world. Even cross-border M&A needs to have a “strong element of regionalization,” according to Birla, in this new world.
