India has several billionaire businessmen who built their business empires from scratch. In this article, we will tell you about one such person. His name is Bhadresh Shah. He is the founder and Managing Director of AIA Engineering, a niche metallurgical company in Ahmedabad city. Shah started a small foundry in 1978 and transformed it into a Rs 34,765 crore market cap company.
The 72-year-old is a metallurgy engineer from the premier Indian Institute of Technology (Kanpur). According to Forbes, the billionaire has a real-time net worth of Rs 21,680 crore as of December 11. Shah hails from a family of doctors. However, he chose to study engineering rather than medicine. He is also a wine connoisseur. Shah also sits on the Board of Zydus Lifesciences as an Independent director. The company is headed by pharma billionaire Pankaj Patel.
Shah set up a foundry with the aid of bank loans and financial assistance from his father in 1976. However, his first attempt at supplying metal castings to compressor makers and textile units failed. Later, he adopted a rational approach and changed his business plans. In 1977, he started supplying replacement components to power plants. In 1979, he set up Ahmedabad Induction Alloy (AIA) in partnership with one of his friends.
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Today, AIA is the world's second largest manufacturer of high chromium grinding parts (by sales) for the cement, mining and power industries. The company is a globally acclaimed metallurgical products company that specializes in the design, development, manufacture, installation and servicing of metal castings across industries.
