London-based billionaire Lakshmi Mittal and his son Aditya are planning a $17.8B acquisition of an Ohio company which will make Mittal Steel the world’s biggest:

Last week, in a complicated $17.8 billion deal, Indian entrepreneur Lakshmi Mittal said he would merge his existing steel assets — the privately-held LNM Holdings and the publicly-traded Ispat International — with the U.S.-based International Steel Group (ISG). The deal, which must still gain regulatory approval, would create the world’s biggest steel company, Mittal Steel, to be based in Rotterdam in the Netherlands, and help Mittal pursue his modest goal of making Mittal as synonymous with steel as Ford is with the motor car. The new company could produce up to 10% of the world’s steel…

Mittal made his $6.8B fortune in steel mills all over the world, including Calcutta, Romania, Mexico and Kazakhstan. Ironically, Mittal no longer owns any steel mills in India itself.

He has been able to generate profits by using his scale to buy lower-cost raw materials and by importing modern management techniques into previously inefficient state-run mills.

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Following the lead of Hooters, Starbucks says it will expand into India soon, trying to reverse hundreds of years of tea plantation history dating back to the East India Company (thanks, Super Jagjit!):

“China traditionally has been a tea-drinking country[,] but we turned them into coffee drinkers,” Schultz told a gathering of analysts earlier this month…

But their Asia marketing director, speaking not to Wall Street but to Indian consumers, is singing a gentler hymn:

“India is a tea-based culture. We””””re not saying coffee is a substitute. We””””re saying Starbucks is a place to hang out, to eat and drink, to see and be seen.”

In other words, a place to flirt. And, in fact, gourmet coffee cafes serve exactly that function in Indian cities today:

“With the liberalization of the economy, there are a large number of young Indians with good jobs and attractive incomes,” said Banerjee. “Many still live with their parents. So their income is largely disposable and they need to spend it on something.“

Methinks the key part of that quote is ‘many still live with their parents.’ Cafes function as extended living rooms in space-impaired Manhattan and as libidinous hotspots in privacy-impaired India. They’re just the place for your silken mocha pick-me-up.

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