Gautam Adani- the Gujarat-based industrialist whom tfipost chose as the industrialist of the decade in 2019, is making it even bigger in this decade. As per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Gautam Adani has added 16.2 billion dollars to his wealth in 2021, taking his total fortune to around 50 billion dollars. The increase in Gautam Adani’s wealth in 2021 is more than the topmost tycoons of the business world including Mukesh Ambani, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk.
Shares of almost all of Gautam Adani’s businesses, from port to coal to green energy, surged by more than 50 per cent in the ongoing fiscal year. “Adani has been consistently expanding its business in areas that are resilient to market cycles,” said Sunil Chandiramani, founder and chief executive officer at Nyka Advisory Services. “Now with the entry in data centres business, the group has also indicated its appetite for venturing into technology”, he added.
Gautam Adani added double (16.2 billion dollars) of what Mukesh Ambani (8.1 billion dollars), the richest person of Asia, added in 2021 to his fortunes.
Read More- Gautam Adani – The Industrialist of the Decade
The Adani group controls India’s largest port- Mundra in Gujarat, and apart from the port business, the group’s interests include power generation and transmission, edible oil, real estate, defence and the latest- Data storage.
Born in June 1962, Gautam Adani, a school dropout from Ahmedabad’s CN Vidyalaya, started his journey as a diamond merchant in Mumbai. His family was involved in the textile business, but he was always allured by Mumbai’s thriving diamond industry and had no interest in the family business.
At the age of 18, he dropped out of school and caught a train for Mumbai, where he made millions in the diamond business within three years. By the age of 20, Gautam Adani was a self-made millionaire.
During his school days, Adani visited Gujarat’s Kandla Port and amazed by its grandeur, he decided to build something like that, or even bigger than that. He realised the dream in 1995, almost 15 years after he entered the business when he secured a contract for the Mundra port in Gujarat. Gautam Adani is also the brain behind port-rail linkage policy as he convinced Nitish Kumar, who was railway minister in the Vajpayee government, about the strategic importance of linking railway with ports.
Unlike Ambani, with whom his name is very often clubbed in the popular Ambani-Adani phrase, he started from scratches and made millions within the first few years of his entrepreneurial venture.
Unlike Ambani, Adani had not limited the entrepreneurial venture to India as he invested 10 billion dollars in the Australian coal mine, knowing that he might lose it all if the government scarps the deal.
His above 50 billion dollars wealth primarily comes from a 62 per cent stake in Adani Ports & Special Economic Zone- the flagship company of the group. He also controls a 75 per cent stake in Adani Enterprises, Adani Power, Adani Transmissions and Adani Gas. In the last four years, the wealth of Adani multiplied by 6-7 times, given the growing importance of the infrastructural development, the sector where major businesses of the group lie.
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Now, the power sector behemoth is looking to revolutionise another sector and may make big money in the process. In a massive push for data localisation, the Indian government has asserted that global firms like Amazon and Google must store Indian data in India. The Adani Group plans to capitalise on this development to enter the data storage business.
Adani Group’s stronghold in infrastructure and power generation and burgeoning interest in clean energy and data storage would only multiply his wealth from here in the coming years.