Gautam Adani has toppled Mukesh Ambani from his perch in the global wealth rankings.
The Gujarat-based billionaire, who has had a magical ride ever since Narendra Modi stormed to power in 2014, has been ranked by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index as the richest man in Asia.
The keenly watched Index estimated the 59-year-old Adani’s net worth at $88.5 billion — $600 million higher than Ambani’s $87.9 billion.
Adani is now the world’s tenth richest man after Oracle founder Larry Ellison.
The battle between the two Indian tycoons has been playing out for sometime. Adani has been on a tear since 2014 as he started to rapidly widen the size of his business empire by snapping up assets from debt-stressed industrialists while pouring money into a gaggle of new ventures.
Adani, who has aggressively plugged into Modi’s nation-building Atmanirbhar programme, had started off as a commodities trader and grew quickly in the first decade of this century to become the country’s biggest operator of seaports and terminals.
In barely three years, Adani has gained control of seven airports and almost a quarter of India’s air traffic. His group now owns the country’s largest airport operator, power generator and city gas retailer.
The Adani Group took over the management control of Mumbai International Airport, the country’s second busiest airport, in July last year. It has also taken over the Anil Ambani-owned Reliance Infrastructure Ltd to become the biggest power utility in Mumbai.
Currently, the Adani Group has seven companies listed on the stock markets with a combined market capitalisation of Rs 11,26,986.72 crore.
A battle royale has now started to brew between India’s two biggest tycoons as they square off for a clash in green energy. While Adani has pledged to invest $70 billion over the next decade to become the world’s largest renewable energy group, Mukesh Ambani aims to spend $76 billion, of which $10 billion will be stumped up over the next three years.
The Adani Group’s thrust on green energy should be seen in the context of the bashing it has received from climate activists over its controversial Carmichael coal mining project in Australia. In December 2021, the group announced that the coal mine would commence exports.
Mukesh Ambani, on the other hand, had managed to rope in Facebook, Google and a host of sovereign funds as investors in his oil-to-telecom conglomerate in 2020 soon after the first wave of the pandemic.
But in 2021, the Reliance group has had to battle several setbacks: it has not been able to close its Rs 24,713 crore deal to acquire Kishore Biyani’s Future Retail because of court battles initiated by Amazon.
The bigger disappointment was that it could not nail an agreement with Aramco for its oil-to-chemicals (O2C) business that it intended to spin off from Reliance Industries.
Market mavens believe Mukesh Ambani is looking to rope in strategic investors in his various ventures, including the oil-to-chemicals business and the valuation game isn’t over.
It promises to be a riveting battle between Ambani and Adani — and the first bolt has just been shot.
