Lagatar24 Desk
New Delhi, Feb 8: Gautam Adani, the Indian billionaire who built a conglomerate spanning ports, mining, and green energy from a tiny commodities trading business, is now Asia’s richest person.
According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, the 59-year-old mogul’s net worth surpassed $88.5 billion on Monday, surpassing Mukesh Ambani’s $87.9 billion.
Adani is the world’s largest wealth gainer this year, with an almost $12 billion increase in his own fortune.
The coal mogul, whose controversial Australian mine proposal prompted criticism from climate activists like Greta Thunberg, is increasingly looking for ways to diversify his business outside coal.
He’s branching out into renewable energy, airports, data centres, and defence contracting, all of which Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi sees as critical to the country’s long-term economic aspirations and nation-building.
Some of Adani Group’s publicly traded equities have risen more than 600 percent in the last two years on expectations that Modi’s drive into green energy and infrastructure will pay off as he tries to revitalise India’s $2.9 trillion economy and fulfil the country’s carbon net-zero target by 2070.
The decision by MSCI Inc. to include additional Adani companies in its Indian benchmark index means that any fund that tracks the index would have to buy the shares.
While Ambani’s oil-to-petrochemicals giant Reliance Industries Ltd. amassed billions of dollars in fortune thanks to a technology turnaround that included Facebook and Google Inc. as investors, the pendulum has recently swung back in favour of Adani.
Adani has taken control of seven airports and about a fifth of India’s air traffic in just three years. In the non-state sector, his company currently holds the country’s largest airport operator, power generator, and city gas merchant.
