Indian billionaire Gautam Adani’s group plans to raise at least $10 billion in new debt through the next year to refinance large borrowings and fund projects in its pipeline, Bloomberg News reported on Friday, quoting people in the know.
The Adani group plans to use several vehicles including foreign currency debt and green bonds to raise up to $6 billion to swap its current high-interest debt with lower-cost borrowings and deploy the rest for project financing, according to the report. It added that the effort could begin as early as the current December quarter.
The ports-to-energy conglomerate, which is confident of securing lower-cost loans due to its large asset base even in a backdrop of rising interest rates, aims to lower its burden of repayments, the report said.
An Adani Enterprises spokesperson did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
The report comes more than a month after debt research firm CreditSights, a part of the Fitch group, said it had concerns about the Adani group’s overall debt levels, at a time it is looking to expand aggressively.
Adani last month said the group will invest more than $100 billion over the next decade, most of it in the energy transition business.
After founding the group in 1988 as a commodities trading business, the 60-year-old has ventured into multiple sectors, mainly in the infrastructure space and in line with the priorities of the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
“As a group, we will invest over $100 billion of capital in the next decade,” Adani said at a Global CEO conference in Singapore.
“We have earmarked 70 per cent of this investment for the energy transition space. We are already the world’s largest solar player, and we intend to do far more.”
The group has announced deals worth billions of dollars this year alone, the biggest one being its $10.5 billion acquisition of Holcim AG’s cement businesses in India — Ambuja Cements Ltd and ACC Ltd.
Earlier this week, Adani Defence Systems & Technologies Ltd (ADSTL) said it will acquire MRO operator Air Works for an enterprise value of Rs 400 crore. Air Works has a presence across 27 cities with six maintenance bays.
Adani said the group wanted to be an inexpensive producer of green hydrogen It was building a 10gw photo-voltaic chain, a 10gw wind-turbine manufacturing facility and a 5gw hydrogen electrolyser factory.
