Adani Group's Rs 2 Lakh Crore Annual Capex Plan & Focus on Three Core Verticals

At an All India Management Association (AIMA) event here, Karan Adani answered questions on a range of issues and talked of the need for "de-layering" to bring more efficiency.

"From far off it seems we are doing too many things, if you look closer, we are basically focused on three things. One is an energy utility. We strongly believe that energy will be the future of the global. In this space, there is a lot of opportunity to go vertically integrated as well as to go horizontal in terms of different sorts of energy. That's where the group is playing... Even a data centre is an energy business for us. The second portfolio that the group is in is transport and logistics... The third is materials and science. Any material that the country requires for infrastructure growth or the digitisation... Now we are looking to enter into aluminium as well... each business relies on each other's strength, that makes us unique, allows us to scale up a little faster," he said

"The way we structure is that any new business or vertical we see India needs or where we see a big opportunity, we incubate that in Adani Enterprise. Adani Enterprise is the core for us... Once a business comes to a certain scale, we de-merge it, and then it runs independently... One of the things that from 2010 we started doing was rating all our businesses at the global bond market," he added.

Answering a query, he said the Adani Group is committed to doing greenfield capex of Rs 2 lakh crore every year for the next five years.

"Two things that we have noticed as we have scaled are that we have become slow and quite fat. As a group, we are committed to doing greenfield capex of Rs 2 lakh crore every year for the next five years. So if we have to physically execute this kind of capex, it's impossible to do it in the current method. For us, what matters is speed and scalability... We'd rather focus on the large projects, on scale and on executing for a business purpose and not for an execution purpose," he said.

Answering a query, he said there is growing participation of women in the workforce. Karan Adani also talked about the benefit of bringing down average age of the organisation so that there is quicker technology absorption.

"How do we de-layer our organisation? My target is to bring it down to six layers from 15... (The percentage of women employees) right now is roughly 15%. We are already working actively towards increasing that participation. 15% looks small, but if you look at us five years back, it was 2%... The second thing was how to reduce the age of the organization," he said.

"Because it's nothing to do with one or the other, but we believe that if technology adoption or AI adoption has to happen in the organisation, then we need to reduce the age... Third is how do we give maximum opportunity to students who are in the third and fourth tier towns because we find that those kids have the maximum hunger to drive an objective, deliver, and prove something continuously," he added.

He also said that going sustainable and moving towards green initiatives can increase profitability.

"Most of the time when we think of conscious capital or being sustainable, we think it's at the cost of profitability. I am of the firm view that it is not one or the other. You can be extremely profitable or sometimes increase your profitability by going sustainable... Today, all our port operations are done through heavy-duty trucks that run completely running on diesel. This year, we will be converting everything to EV, and my payback for that whole investment is one year," he said.

- ANI