‘Powerful Instances Don’t Final. Powerful Corporations Do’: Kumar Mangalam Birla calls India’s development a ‘sturdy fixed’
In his annual reflections word for 2025-26, Aditya Birla Group Chairman Kumar Mangalam Birla supplied a blunt learn of how geopolitics is reshaping enterprise selections, and why firms can now not depend on secure alliances or predictable guidelines.
“We now function in a geopolitical market, the place vitality companions differ from expertise allies, and yesterday’s associates might not share tomorrow’s agenda,” Birla mentioned, describing a world system more and more pushed by negotiated offers relatively than established frameworks.
Birla mentioned the world stays a “U3 world: Unsure, Unpredictable, and Unorthodox,” including that the “contracts between nation states are being recrafted” as diplomacy provides strategy to “stark realpolitik.” The defining shift, he argued, is the rise of a deals-based international order, the place outcomes are being formed extra by transactions than by rulebooks.
India because the “sturdy fixed” in a shifting international order
Towards this volatility, Birla positioned India’s development story as unusually regular.
“In an in any other case unsettled world, India’s development has emerged as one of many few sturdy constants,” he wrote, attributing it to the “regular compounding of demographics, formalisation, infrastructure, and ambition.”
He mentioned India’s scale and continuity matter extra on this atmosphere: “In a deals-based world, scale, credibility, and continuity matter, and India more and more affords all three.”
UltraTech, lending enlargement and the pivot to new client bets
Birla tied India’s infrastructure buildout to the group’s personal enlargement, pointing to a pointy rise in road-building during the last decade and UltraTech’s capability development alongside it. He mentioned UltraTech has scaled from 60 million tonnes each year a decade in the past to over 190 million tonnes right now, making it “the most important cement firm by gross sales quantity on the planet, exterior China.”
He additionally highlighted formal credit score development to MSMEs and mentioned the group’s NBFC mortgage ebook expanded from round Rs 17,000 crore to just about Rs 1.5 lakh crore in a decade.
Birla mentioned India’s consumption development has widened alternative past conventional metros, serving to the group scale a number of new bets in a brief interval. He pointed to launches together with Birla Opus in paints, Indriya in jewelry retail, and Birla Pivot in B2B e-commerce, arguing that the previous 12 months validated each execution and ambition.
Vodafone Thought, AGR readability and the push for 3 personal telecom gamers
Birla additionally addressed the group’s telecom three way partnership Vodafone Thought, describing the decision of the AGR situation as a significant inflection level.
“The Vodafone Thought expertise underlines my perception that Powerful Instances Don’t Final. Powerful Corporations Do,” he mentioned, including that the working atmosphere has “basically modified.”
“A wholesome, aggressive telecom trade is important to India’s digital future. India deserves 3 personal telecom gamers. India deserves a profitable Vodafone Thought. And that is, as soon as once more, an thought whose time has come,” he wrote.
Technique should evolve with context, Birla says
In a remaining reflection, Birla argued towards static technique in fast-changing markets: “Technique doesn’t outline the enterprise; the enterprise context defines technique.”
He cited Hindalco’s shifts between upstream and downstream priorities, and mentioned the group plans to deploy roughly $6 billion over 5 years throughout aluminium and copper upstream in India.
Birla ended with a broader message for enterprise leaders navigating uncertainty: that resilience comes from organisational agility, collected goodwill and the self-discipline to behave earlier than certainty arrives.
