Gautam Adani has a knack for surviving crisis. He was held for ransom more than two decades ago and in 2008 was among the hostages of Mumbai’s Taj Mahal Palace hotel during the terror attacks that killed more than 160 people.
Since then, his business acumen and ability to overcome obstacles have propelled him to the ranks of India’s richest. And while the coronavirus outbreak sank the nation into an unprecedented recession this year, Adani’s group has kept growing. His conglomerate secured global partners, investments and pushed into new sectors.
Shares of most of his firms have surged, including those of his mining, gas and ports units. Adani Green Energy Ltd. has jumped more than sixfold this year as it received a record $6 billion solar-power deal, another step toward the company’s goal of becoming the world’s largest renewable-energy maker by 2025.
“The market is having FOMO syndrome when it comes to Adani stocks,” said Sanjiv Bhasin, director at investment-management firm IIFL Securities Ltd. “Its businesses are aligned to the current central-government vision. Therefore, the road ahead is smooth for this conglomerate for at least five to six years.”
With a fortune valued at $32.4 billion, Adani is India’s wealthiest person after Mukesh Ambani, who has dominated news headlines for partnering with some of the major names of Silicon Valley. This year alone, the stock surges have added $21.1 billion to Adani’s net worth -- even more than Ambani’s gain, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Adani Group representatives declined to comment for this story.
“India’s position is similar to America’s Gilded Age, with Ambani and Adani like the modern day Rockefellers and Vanderbuilts,” said James Crabtree, an associate professor at the National University of Singapore and author of The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India’s New Gilded Age, which discusses the rise of the nation’s tycoons. “The risk is India creates a class of entrenched business oligarchs.”
After dropping out of college, Adani tried his luck in Mumbai’s diamond industry in the early 1980s. He soon moved back to his home state of Gujarat to help run his brother’s plastics business before setting up in 1988 Adani Enterprises Ltd., the group’s flagship commodities trader. A decade later, he started to operate the port of Mundra, located on the coast of the Arabian Sea, eventually building India’s largest private-sector port operator.
The group has also become the nation’s biggest non-state owned power producer and a leader in coal mining, and has expanded abroad. In Australia, the tycoon is still dealing with negative publicity for his Carmichael thermal-coal project, for which he won approval last year after a decade-long struggle with regulators and environmentalists.
Like other entrepreneurs, Adani repeatedly picked hot new industries that the government was pushing to develop and where competition was relatively minimal. Even now, the 58-year-old tycoon often cites “nation building” as a key plank of his strategy, a cause that aligns with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision.