Industrialist Gautam Adani is expected to invest over $150 billion across group businesses such as airports, green energy, airports, and healthcare in a bid to get a $1-trillion valuation tag.
The group has companies that operate across sectors including ports, airports, roads, renewable energy, power transmission, gas distribution, petrochemicals, FMCG, cement and media.
Adani group chief financial officer Jugeshinder Singh laid out the group’s growth plans at an investor meet. He further added that the group plans to invest $50-70 billion in green hydrogen business and $23 billion in green energy over the next 5-10 years. The group also plans to invest $7 billion in electricity transmission, $12 billion in transport utility and $5 billion in road sector.
Adani’s foray into data centres entails another investment of $6.5 billion and another $9-10 billion in airports. The group recently entered the cement sector with the acquisition of ACC and Ambuja Cement tour $10 billion.
It is foraying into the petrochemical business with plans to set up a 1 million tonnes per annum PVC manufacturing facility at an investment of USD 2 billion and would enter the copper sector with a 0.5 million tonnes a year smelter at an investment of USD 1 billion, he said. The healthcare sector foray that will include insurance, hospitals and diagnostic and pharma would see an investment of USD 7-10 billion, with some coming from Adani Foundation.
“Whatever you see today, it might look like it has just happened in the last one or two years, but in reality what we have done, both GSA (Gautam Shantilal Adani) and myself discussed this in 2015,” Singh said at the investor meeting adding the conglomerate is a result of a well-thought-out business plan that entailed foraying into adjacencies of existing business.
The group’s market capitalisation was around USD 16 billion in 2015 and it is USD 260 billion in 2022 – a surge of over 16x in seven years. “Given what we had as a set of companies, we believed that if we had assets and companies of that type we should really be a USD 1 trillion group. So we went through the steps that we needed to take to get to the point,” he said. There are only a handful of companies that are valued at trillion dollars or more. These include Apple, Saudi Aramco, Microsoft, Google’s parent Alphabet and Amazon.
Singh said the Adani Group has set about building its infrastructure and logistics portfolio in a manner that it could emerge as the top five globally and not just India’s largest player. “Look at Adani Ports, Adani transmission, Adani Total Gas, Adani Power, combined when you look at these businesses, these businesses are in total infra and utility portfolio was formed by four core portfolios,” he said.
“It is the fastest growing portfolio of any comparable size infra portfolio. Our primary industry vertical materials metals and mining again sits next to our core of the infrastructure.”
Explaining the logic being the expansions, he said for a trading company it made sense for Adani group to be in the ports business. And since energy is vital for this, the foray into distributed energy and finally into gas to provide an integrated logistics and infrastructure portfolio.
