Gautam Adani an Indian billionaire businessman

OV Digital Desk
3 Min Read
Gautam Adani

Gautam Shantilal Adani (24 June 1962) an Indian billionaire industrialist, and philanthropist who is the chairman and founder of the Adani Group, the president of the Adani Foundation.

Early Life

Gautam Shantilal Adani was born on 24 June 1962, in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India. His family was involved in the textile business.

From an early age, he was ambitious and determined. As a teenager, he dropped out of school because he wasn’t interested in academics. Later, he went to Gujarat University but didn’t finish his degree. He was interested in business, but he didn’t want to join his dad’s textile business.

Career

When he was 18, he left Ahmedabad and moved to Mumbai because of his entrepreneurial spirit. In a couple of years, he set up a diamond brokerage business after a few years of working as a diamond sorter at Mahindra Brothers.

His business did well, and he became a millionaire by the time he was 20. At this point, Gautam Adani’s elder brother had just bought an Ahmedabad plastic factory and asked him for help running it.

Adani went back to Ahmedabad to work with his brother. In the next three years, he began trading commodities by importing Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC), a key raw material for plastic. In South Korea, he made deals to import PVC.

In 1988, he founded Adani Exports Limited (now Adani Enterprises Ltd). Over the years, the company expanded into power and agricultural commodities.

Adani got the contract to run Mundra Port in 1995 after Gujarat’s government invited private companies to bid. It was operated by Mundra Port & Special Economic Zone Limited, which later became Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone Limited (APSEZ). It’s now India’s largest private port operator.

In 1996, Gautam Adani formed Adani Power Limited, a power subsidiary of Adani Group. The company is India’s biggest private power producer and biggest solar power producer.

His power generation company was started in 2006. Besides that, he bought Abbot Point Port in Australia and Carmichael coal mine in Queensland from 2009 to 2012.

He founded The Adani Group in 1988 and diversified his business into resources, logistics, energy, agriculture, defense, and aerospace, amongst others. His Net worth is US$68.1 billion (as of 23 June 2021). Adani was the second richest man in Asia and the 13th richest man in the world according to Forbes.

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