Adani Enterprises Ltd (AEL), the flagship company of the Adani group, on Wednesday announced a price band of Rs 3,112-3,276 per share for the country’s largest follow-on public offering (FPO), with a discount of Rs 64 per share to retail investors.

AEL is planning to raise Rs 20,000 crore from the float which will open for subscription on January 27 and close on January 31.

Investors will have to bid for a minimum lot of four shares and in multiples thereafter. On application, the bidders will have to pay 50 per cent of the offer price upfront.

The rest will be paid in one or more tranches to be decided by the AEL board. The flagship, with interests from energy to airports, filed the papers for FPO earlier during the day.

In a regulatory filing, the company said its board on Wednesday approved a floor price of Rs 3,112 per share while the cap price was set at Rs 3,276 per share.

Institutional investors will apply at the upper band of the price range, which is a discount of 10 per cent to AEL’s closing price of Rs 3,638.85 on Tuesday.

Adani will use about half of the issue proceeds — Rs 10,869 crore of Rs 20,000-crore FPO — for green hydrogen projects, work at the existing airports and the construction of a greenfield expressway in Uttar Pradesh. It will repay Rs 4,165 crore of debts taken by its airports, road and solar project subsidiaries, the red herring prospectus said.

Commenting on the growth plans in the businesses, including clean energy, AEL said it is expanding its solar manufacturing capabilities to become a fully backward integrated player.

This will cover the manufacture of the components of a solar module — from silicon, and ingots wafers cells — to the module itself, apart from related ancillary products.

The company said it plans to expand the solar module manufacturing capabilities at Mundra SEZ to up to 10GW per annum.

As part of this strategy, subsidiary Mundra Solar Technology Ltd (MSTL) is proposing to set up a plant of annual capacity of 2 GW for the manufacture of ingot wafers in Gujarat.

Currently, its solar manufacturing facility, which makes cells, modules and ancillary products, has an installed capacity of 3.5GW.

The total estimated project cost of the MSTL integrated plant is Rs 1,811.78 crore, with Rs 600 crore to be used from the FPO proceeds.

The FPO proceeds will be used in the upgradation of the Ahmedabad International Airport (AIAL) that will involve a cost of Rs 2,268 crore.

Adani will also upgrade the Mangalore airport for Rs 304 crore and Lucknow airport for Rs 2,272 crore. AEL has also set up a subsidiary — Budaun Hardoi Road Pvt Ltd — to construct a 151km six-lane expressway from Budaun to Hardoi in Uttar Pradesh on a design build finance operate transfer (DBFOT) model basis.

It will invest Rs 987 crore from FPO in the project.

The subsidiary, Unnao Prayagraj Road Pvt Ltd, will build an expressway from Unnao to Prayagraj in Uttar Pradesh on the DBFOT model.

Around Rs 878 crore will be invested from the net proceeds in this project. As of September 30, 2022, AEL had Rs 40,023.50 crore in borrowings from banks and financial institutions, comprising term loans (including foreign currency borrowings), working capital loans and trade or supplier credit.

While Rs 28,449.46 crore were the outstanding secured borrowing, the unsecured borrowing that included commercial paper, convertible debentures and inter-corporate loans cumulatively stood at Rs 11,574 crore.

AEL is proposing to utilise Rs 4,165.00 crore from the net proceeds towards the repayment of borrowings of its three subsidiaries: Adani Airport Holdings Ltd, Adani Road Transport Ltd and Mundra Solar Ltd.