Adani’s Journey: From Rejected College Applicant to $220 Billion Empire: Rediff Moneynews

New Delhi, Sep 5 (PTI) Gautam Adani applied for admission to a college in Mumbai in the late 1970s, but the college rejected his application. He did not pursue his studies but ventured into business and built an empire worth $220 billion. About four-and-a-half decades later, he was called to the same college to deliver a lecture to students on Teachers’ Day.

Adani moved to Mumbai at age 16 and began working as a diamond sorter. Around the same time, in 1977 or 1978, he applied to the city’s Jai Hind College. “But they rejected him,” said Vikram Nankani, president of the Jai Hind College Alumni Association, introducing India’s second-richest person before his lecture.

He applied to Jai Hind College because his elder brother Vinod had previously studied at the same school.

“Fortunately or unfortunately, the college did not accept him, so he took up a full-time job and pursued another career,” Nankani said, declaring Gautam Adani a “deemed graduate” because he had applied for admission.

After working as a diamond sorter for almost two years, he returned to his home state of Gujarat to run a packaging factory run by his brother.

He never really looked back after founding a commodities trading company in 1998. Over the next two and a half decades, his debt-fueled businesses diversified into ports, mining, infrastructure, power, city gas, renewable energy, cement, real estate, data centers and media.

The infrastructure giant, which runs 13 of India’s seaports, operates seven airports, is the largest private player in the market, the largest producer of renewable energy, runs the country’s second-largest cement company, builds expressways and redevelops Asia’s largest slums, has been described by some as the most aggressive representative of India’s new generation of entrepreneurs.

Delivering his lecture, “Breaking Boundaries: The Power of Passion and Unconventional Paths to Success,” 62-year-old Adani set out to break his first boundary when he was just 16.

“It had to do with leaving my education and deciding to move to an unknown future in Mumbai. People keep asking me, ‘Why did you move to Mumbai? Why didn’t you complete your education?’ The answer lies in the heart of every young dreamer who sees boundaries not as barriers but as challenges that test their courage.

“My goal was to see if I had the courage to build a life for myself in the most developing city in our country,” he said.

Mumbai became his testing ground where he learned to sort and trade diamonds.

“Trading is a great teacher. I learned early on that an entrepreneur can never be frozen by overestimating the choices before him,” he said. “It was Mumbai that taught me, ‘To think big, you must first dare to dream beyond your boundaries.’”

In the 1980s, he founded a polymer importing trade organization to supply struggling small businesses. “By the time I was 23, my trading business was doing well,” he said.

After economic liberalization in 1991, he founded a global trading house that traded polymers, metals, textiles and agricultural products. He was just 29 years old at the time.

“Within two years, we became the largest global trading house in the country. That’s when I understood the combined value of speed and scale,” he said.
“Then in 1994 we decided it was time to go public, and Adani Exports, now known as Adani Enterprises, went public. The public offering was a huge success and underscored for me the importance of public markets.”

Adani realised that to break new boundaries, it first had to challenge its own status quo and invest in assets to provide itself with a solid foundation.

In the mid-1990s, he was approached by global commodities trading company Cargill with a proposal to work with them to produce and supply salt from the Kutch region of Gujarat.

“Even though the partnership fell through, we were left with about 40,000 acres of marshland and an agreement to build a jetty at Mundra (in Gujarat) for salt export,” he said.

What others saw as a marshy, barren land, he saw as a canvas waiting to be transformed. This canvas is now by far India’s largest port.

“Mundra today is India’s largest port, largest industrial SEZ, largest container terminals, largest thermal power plant, largest solar power plant, largest copper plant and largest edible oil refinery. And yet we are only about 10 per cent of what Mundra will eventually become,” he said.

He is currently building the world’s largest renewable energy park in the inhospitable deserts of Kutch and is redeveloping the Dharavi slums in Mumbai.

“While we have helped redefine India’s infrastructure across airports, ports, logistics, industrial parks and energy, it is not our victories that define us. It is our attitude to meet and overcome challenges that has shaped the Adani Group’s journey,” he added.