From a Rajasthan cotton trade to aluminium, cement and a cricket franchise
In 1857 Shiv Narayan Birla began trading cotton in the desert town of Pilani. Five generations later the business his family built makes more of India's cement than anyone else, runs the world's largest aluminium rolling company, and co-owns Royal Challengers Bengaluru, the IPL cricket team.
The leap from trading to industry came with G. D. Birla, Shiv Narayan's grandson, who moved into jute, cotton and textiles, founded factories, and was known for his ties to Mahatma Gandhi. In 1962 he opened India's first integrated aluminium works at Renukoot. His own grandson, Aditya Vikram Birla, took the family abroad in 1969 with companies in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Egypt, and pushed into metals, cement and telecoms.
Kumar Mangalam Birla has chaired the group since his father died in 1995, and his era has been one of big purchases. A hostile takeover of Larsen and Toubro's cement arm, completed in 2004, produced UltraTech. Hindalco paid 6.1 billion dollars for the flat-rolled aluminium maker Novelis in 2007 and later bought Aleris. Pantaloons, Binani Cement and a Swedish pulp producer, Domsjö Fabriker, followed, along with Shell's Indian renewables business, Sprng Energy.
Today the group spans fibres, chemicals, carbon black for tyres, insulators, finance, fashion, mining, commodities trading and a telecom joint venture in Vodafone Idea. Its copper subsidiary runs Asia's largest single-site smelter. More than half of roughly 70 billion dollars in annual revenue comes from abroad, and seven listed companies together topped 110 billion dollars in market value in August 2026.
Cricket arrived in 2026, when a consortium with The Times Group, Bolt Ventures and Blackstone bought the Bengaluru franchise for 16,600 crore rupees. A holding company founded in 1980 owns the Birla brand itself, and listed group firms now pay it a royalty of a quarter of one percent of revenue, capped each year.
Source: Aditya Birla Group
