Gautam Adani’s group to invest $150 billion in pursuit of $1 trillion valuation

Recently, Adani Group Chief Financial Officer Jugeshinder ‘Robbie’ Singh revealed detailed the growth plans of the group, which started off as a trader in 1988 and expanded rapidly into ports, airports, roads, power, renewable energy, power transmission, gas distribution, and FMCG and more recently into data centres, airports, petrochemicals, cement, and media, at an investor meet organised by Ventura Securities Ltd in New Delhi.

The Adani Group is planning to invest $50-70 billion in the green hydrogen business and another $23 billion in green energy over the next 5-10 years, the CFO said.

He added that investment of $7 billion will be for electricity transmission, $12 billion for the transport utility sector, and $5 billion in the road sector, respectively.

The Group’s data centre business with cloud services would entail an investment of $6.5 billion in partnership with Edge ConneX and another $9-10 billion is planned for airports. Its foray into the cement sector with the acquisition of ACC and Ambuja cement entailed a $10 billion investment. 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 $2 billion and would enter the copper sector with a 0.5 million tonnes a year smelter at an investment of $1 billion, he said. The healthcare sector foray that will include insurance, hospitals, and diagnostic and pharma would see an investment of $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.

Recently, Bloomberg news agency reported that Asia’s richest person might raise at least $10 billion in new debt over the next year as his conglomerate seeks to refinance its high-cost borrowings and fund projects in the pipeline.

Citing sources, the report said the conglomerate is confident of securing lower-cost loans due to its bigger asset base now.

Last week, Adani Group agreed to acquire Air Works, one of India’s major centres for the maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) of aircraft.

The Group is also in advanced talks with debt-laden Jaiprakash Power Ventures Ltd. to buy its cement unit. The Group has already bought Ambuja Cements Ltd. and ACC Ltd.

The market capitalisation of Adani Group was around $16 billion in 2015 and, it has surged to $260 billion in 2022 – an increase 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 $1 trillion group. So we went through the steps that we needed to take to get to the point,” Adani Group’s Robbie added.

Globally, 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.