India's Adani Group is in talks with large Singapore investors in a bid to raise as much as $10 billion, Indian media have reported. One of the investment firms that the conglomerate held talks with is Singapore's sovereign wealth fund GIC.
The group promoted by Gautam Adani, the world's third richest person, also held talks with Singapore investment firm Temasek, according to the Mint daily. The mammoth cash hunt is intended to boost Adani Group's footprint in clean energy, ports and cement businesses.
Adani said last month that his company would invest more than $100 billion in the next ten years, mainly in the energy transition business. "As a group, we will invest over $100 billion of capital in the next decade ... We have earmarked 70% of this investment for the energy transition space. We are already the world's largest solar player, and we intend to do far more," Adani had said.
During the Forbes Global CEO Conference in Singapore last month, Adani also stated that his company's aggressive investment in the energy business will help India become a net energy exporter. "In addition to our existing 20 GW renewables portfolio, the new business will be augmented by another 45 GW of hybrid renewable power generation spread over 100,000 hectares of land - an area 1.4 times that of Singapore. This will lead to commercialization of three million metric tonne of green hydrogen," he said, according to the Economic Times.
The Adani Group
Adani Group is a sprawling conglomerate that controls huge companies engaged in varied businesses ranging from energy to ports and from utilities, transport and logistics to airports. The Group is a diversified organisation with market cap of over $166.5 billion comprising seven publicly listed companies.
The Group is headquartered in Ahmedabad in the industrialized western Indian state of Gujarat. The Group's website says it employs 23,000 people.
Gautam Adani is a first-generation businessman and has a net worth of $92 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The Rise of Adani Group
In mid-September, Adani briefly took the position of the second richest person in the world, edging out giants Jeff Bezos and France's Bernard Arnault. Adani, with a net worth $154.7 billion, stayed in the second spot of the Forbes real time rich list only briefly, before being pushed back to the third sport by Jeff Bezos.
Adani's rise as a global billionaire has nothing short of astounding. According to the Business Insider, before the pandemic struck, Adnani's total net worth was a mere $6 billion. This rose more than 2,400 percent in the last three years to make him one of the three richest businessmen in the world. In the process, he has also edged out long-entrenched Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani of Reliance Industries as the richest in the country. The Adani Group also edged past the Tata conglomerate in terms of market capitalization.
