Anil Manibhai Naik will step down as non-executive chairman of Larsen & Toubro, the engineering-to-information technology conglomerate announced on Wednesday. Naik, 80, will assume the role of chairman emeritus when his term ends on 30 September.

S.N. Subrahmanyan, L&T’s chief executive officer and managing director, will be redesignated as chairman and managing director from 1 October, the company said.

Against all odds: Naik has had a remarkable 58 years at L&T, where he started as a junior engineer in 1965 and rose to become chairman and managing director in 2003. He later served as group executive chairman from 2012 to 2017. He stepped aside from executive responsibilities in 2017 and was appointed group chairman.

Calling him the “architect of the transformation of L&T,” the conglomerate said Naik “was instrumental in upholding L&T’s independence as a professionally managed company and steered the company through many challenging times.”

If L&T survives today, it may well be because of Naik. In the 1980s, when the company was executing Reliance’s petrochemicals project, Dhirubhai Ambani took a fancy to it and launched a hostile takeover bid. Naik is credited with foiling the bid as he went door-to-door canvassing L&T’s shareholders to reject the bid.

Subsequently, Naik who was by now MD and CEO, faced a takeover challenge from Aditya Birla Group chairman Kumar Mangalam Birla who wanted L&T’s cement division. A reluctant Naik carved out the business into a separate entity and created the L&T Employees Welfare Foundation (later renamed the L&T Employees Trust), which ended up owning a 14.95% stake in the company as part of the transaction to sell the cement business to Birla. As a part of the deal, Naik negotiated that another 15% would be earmarked for employee stock options, of which he became the biggest beneficiary.

If L&T today is a player to reckon with in software services, again the credit goes to Naik, who assiduously built the business over two decades. L&T’s software business didn’t have the scale for the longest time even as Naik tried hard to acquire Hyderabad-based Satyam Computer Services but lost to the Mahindras. Naik persisted and eventually made a hostile bid for Bengaluru-based Mindtee, which was then merged with L&T Infotech. LTI Mindtree is now the fifth largest player in the IT services sector.

If there was ever a criticism of Naik, it would certainly have to do with the way he tried to stay at the helm of the company. At one point, there were more L&T employees on the board than independent directors, and that ensured that he continued much beyond the age of 65, which was initially thought to be his retirement age. The board gave him multiple extensions, which led to an exodus of talent as managers saw few prospects of reaching the top. It also made finding his successor difficult.