Søren Kristian Toubro

Søren Kristian Toubro (27 February 1906 – 4 March 1982) was a Danish engineer who co-founded the engineering firm Larsen & Toubro, an India-based conglomerate. Toubro began his career as a civil engineer. As an employee of F. L. Smidth & Co. of Copenhagen, he came to India in 1934 to erect and commission the equipment supplied to the Madukkarai Cement Works (near Coimbatore) and the Rohri Cement Factory (near the Sukkur Barrage in Sindh). Sometime after landing in India, he read a report in The Bombay Chronicle that quoted Mohandas K. Gandhi as saying: "(I am) not leading a movement to rid India of its white colonial masters in order to substitute them with brown ones." Toubro felt that such an India would "offer great opportunities to anyone with modern technological and management skills." In 1938, Toubro partnered with his former schoolmate Henning Holck-Larsen, a chemical engineer and a fellow F.L.Smidth's employee, to establish Larsen & Toubro. The idea of L&T was conceived during a holiday in Matheran, a hill station near Mumbai. Holck-Larsen was a risk-taker while Toubro was more conservative. Larsen & Toubro saw opportunities in India at a time, when few Europeans had realised the country's potential for industrial growth. The first office of L&T, located in Mumbai, was so small that only one of them could use it a time. Initially, L&T represented Danish dairy equipment manufacturers. However, the Danish imports were restricted during World War II, forcing L&T to start a small workshop that provided servicing and undertook small jobs. The imports stopped after the German invasion of Denmark, forcing L&T to start manufacturing dairy equipment indigenously, a move that was successful. Seeing opportunity in ship repair during wartime, Larsen and Toubro formed a new company called Hilda Ltd. Around this time, L&T also started two repair and fabrication shops. The internment of German engineers who were supposed to build a soda ash plant for the Tatas provided L&T another new opportunity.