‘Tough Times Don’t Last. Tough Companies Do’: Kumar Mangalam Birla calls India's growth a 'durable constant'

In his annual reflections note for 2025-26, Aditya Birla Group Chairman Kumar Mangalam Birla offered a blunt read of how geopolitics is reshaping business decisions, and why companies can no longer rely on stable alliances or predictable rules.

“We now operate in a geopolitical marketplace, where energy partners differ from technology allies, and yesterday’s friends may not share tomorrow’s agenda,” Birla said, describing a global system increasingly driven by negotiated deals rather than established frameworks.

Birla said the world remains a “U3 world: Uncertain, Unpredictable, and Unorthodox,” adding that the “contracts between nation states are being recrafted” as diplomacy gives way to “stark realpolitik.” The defining shift, he argued, is the rise of a deals-based global order, where outcomes are being shaped more by transactions than by rulebooks.

India as the “durable constant” in a shifting global order

Against this volatility, Birla positioned India's growth story as unusually steady.

“In an otherwise unsettled world, India’s growth has emerged as one of the few durable constants,” he wrote, attributing it to the “steady compounding of demographics, formalisation, infrastructure, and ambition.”

He said India’s scale and continuity matter more in this environment: “In a deals-based world, scale, credibility, and continuity matter, and India increasingly offers all three.”

UltraTech, lending expansion and the pivot to new consumer bets

Birla tied India’s infrastructure buildout to the group’s own expansion, pointing to a sharp rise in road-building over the last decade and UltraTech’s capacity growth alongside it. He said UltraTech has scaled from 60 million tonnes per annum a decade ago to over 190 million tonnes today, making it “the largest cement company by sales volume in the world, outside China.”

He also highlighted formal credit growth to MSMEs and said the group’s NBFC loan book expanded from around Rs 17,000 crore to nearly Rs 1.5 lakh crore in a decade.

Birla said India’s consumption growth has widened opportunity beyond traditional metros, helping the group scale multiple new bets in a short period. He pointed to launches including Birla Opus in paints, Indriya in jewellery retail, and Birla Pivot in B2B e-commerce, arguing that the past year validated both execution and ambition.

Vodafone Idea, AGR clarity and the push for three private telecom players

Birla also addressed the group’s telecom joint venture Vodafone Idea, describing the resolution of the AGR issue as a major inflection point.

“The Vodafone Idea experience underlines my belief that Tough Times Don’t Last. Tough Companies Do,” he said, adding that the operating environment has “fundamentally changed.”

“A healthy, competitive telecom industry is essential to India’s digital future. India deserves 3 private telecom players. India deserves a successful Vodafone Idea. And this is, once again, an idea whose time has come,” he wrote.

Strategy must evolve with context, Birla says

In a final reflection, Birla argued against static strategy in fast-changing markets: “Strategy does not define the business; the business context defines strategy.”

He cited Hindalco’s shifts between upstream and downstream priorities, and said the group plans to deploy approximately $6 billion over five years across aluminium and copper upstream in India.

Birla ended with a broader message for business leaders navigating uncertainty: that resilience comes from organisational agility, accumulated goodwill and the discipline to act before certainty arrives.