Gautam Adani | From a trader to the world’s third-richest

The Gujarat-­based industrialist, whose interests spread from ports and airports to power, media and telecom, has a net worth of $140 billion 

Industrialist Gautam Adani, who founded the ports-to-green energy Adani Group, last week broke into the top three in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, trailing only Tesla founder Elon Musk and Amazon boss Jeff Bezos. Mr. Adani, whose net worth is pegged at just over $140 billion as on September 3 according to the index, surpassed luxury brand LVMH owner Bernard Arnault to occupy the third slot, the first Asian to do so.

Mr. Adani’s first brush with business was when he dropped out of college and left his native Gujarat — where his father ran a textiles unit — to try his hand in diamond trading in Mumbai. In 1981, still barely out of his teens, he returned home to chip in at his brother’s venture that made plastic films. The scent of an import opportunity struck in 1988 when he saw domestic demand for polyvinyl chloride (PVC) far surpassing local supply. As business volumes spiked, a foray into exports was the next obvious step.

The inflection point in the career of the now 60-year-old Mr. Adani came, ironically, not when he partnered a global firm, but when one such partner exited their joint venture. Cargill and the Adani Group had agreed to set up a salt farm in Mundra, Gujarat, and had even acquired permission to build a jetty to ship the output. But Cargill walked out of the venture — with ostensible reasons for the U.S. farm produce and food giant’s departure ranging from a disagreement between the partners over shareholding to protests by activists against the salt farms. This was around 1991-92, just after India’s economic liberalisation had been set in motion.

The abortive salt farm venture, however, left the Adani Group with about 3,000 acres of land that would prove the springboard for its next stage of growth.

At a time when Mr. Adani was said to have been looking to move beyond trading and eyeing an entry into an assets-based business, and in what would eventually prove to be a serendipitous turn of events, Gujarat announced a pioneering port policy in 1995 that threw open the doors to private investment in the sector. With the group’s own trading business frequently impacted by delays in cargo clearance at other ports in the country, Mr. Adani decided this was the opportune moment to set up a port and thus was born the Mundra port venture. Today, the Mundra Port is India’s largest private port, offering shippers the ability to load and unload bulk or containerised cargo.

For someone who avers destiny saved him, both from a kidnapping-for-ransom in the early 1990s and from the November 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai when he happened to be at the Taj Mahal Palace hotel, Mr. Adani has bet the future of his business not just on providence, but as observers point out, on sniffing out opportunities allied to existing business or those offering benefits of vertical integration.

For instance, the SEZ policy of 2000 allowed for the setting up of such a zone in land adjoining the Mundra Port. Both these businesses were later combined under the Adani Ports and SEZ Ltd. umbrella. Observers say this company is still the cash cow that allows the group to foray into newer kinds of businesses.