See-saw continues as Gautam Adani surpasses Ambani to richest person in Asia

In an ongoing see-saw, Gautam Adani, the chairperson of ports-to-green-energy conglomerate Adani Group, has again overtaken Mukesh Ambani of Reliance Industries to become the richest person in Asia. According to Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Adani’s personal fortune increased to $88.5 billion on Monday, surpassing Ambani’s $87.9 billion. The index also adds that the 59-year-old business tycoon’s personal fortune has made more gains this year than anyone else in the world — adding $12 billion to his coffers.

Adani made his fortune by foraying into coal — first into trading, and then building India’s largest thermal power capacity in the private sector. However, seeing a perceptible shift in the country towards renewable energy, he was quick to get on the bandwagon. Presently, his $70-billion investment pledge towards renewables is touted to make his company the world’s largest renewable power producer by 2030. His thermal portfolio is said to be at least 7% less emission-intensive than India’s other power plants, and is also tapping the hydrogen opportunity along with Mukesh Ambani.

He forged a joint venture with Singapore-based Wilmar International in 1999 to create Adani-Wilmar — an agri-processing company primarily making edible oils, castor oil, oleo chemicals and specialty fats. Today, the company sells a wide range of edible oils such as soya, mustard, rice bran, groundnut and cotton seed. It closed its IPO a day prior to the Union Budget, 20% short of its original IPO size, and its scrips have started trading on the BSE and NSE on Tuesday.

Adani forayed into India’s burgeoning aviation sector in 2019. His company, Adani Airports, has won the mandate to modernize and operate six airports — Ahmedabad, Lucknow, Mangaluru, Jaipur, Guwahati and Thiruvananthapuram. However, the crown jewel in its portfolio is the Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport in Mumbai — India’s second-busiest airport — which it acquired after a two-year tussle with the GVK Group.

A college dropout from a middle-class, textile mercantile family, Adani dabbled in Mumbai’s diamond trade in the early 1980s before returning to Gujarat to work with his brother in his small plastics factory. In 1988, he started his own enterprise — now the Adani Group — to enter the commodities trading business. In 1994, the company listed its shares on the BSE and the NSE. Adani has also fortuitously averted personal catastrophes twice in his life — surviving not only a kidnapping operation, where he was held for ransom, but also the 26/11 terror attacks in Mumbai, where he was among the people dining at the ill-fated Taj Mahal Palace Hotel.

An epochal moment in Adani’s business came when he laid his hands on Mundra, a coastal town in the Kutch region of Gujarat, and commenced operations of the eponymous Mundra Port in 1995. Today, his company has single-handedly put Mundra back on the world map, and is the crown jewel of Adani’s conglomerate — drawing parallels to Reliance’s petrochemicals and refining complex in Jamnagar. The Mundra Port is now the largest privately-run port in the country. It also houses a 4,620 MW coal-based power plant, in which it synchronised the first super-critical technology based 660MW generating unit, creating the first super-critical generating unit in India. The operations are nestled in the Mundra Special Economic Zone (SEZ).