A decade ago Gautam Adani outlined the strategy behind the rapid rise of his business empire: leverage one company to fund another’s expansion. “Either you sit on the pile of cash or you continue to grow,” he told the Financial Times. “There is no other way you can do it.”
It is a method that has served the Indian entrepreneur well as his Adani Group scaled up and diversified in industries from ports to power. He has become one of the world’s richest people in the process, with a fortune of more than $100bn by the start of this year.
The pace of borrowing has only increased as Adani laid out ever more ambitious pushes into areas such as 5G and green hydrogen, with the group’s debt doubling to about $30bn in the past four years.