Optimism comes from Resilience. Resilience comes from Belief. Belief is
Optimism uncharted waters would be
To say the world is in an understatement.
The adverse impact of a mix of the pandemic, armed conflict and climate
change has exposed the fragility of the global system that we had largely considered as
having competently learned how to manage itself. It has now dawned on governments across
the world that the implications of this multidimensional crisis are hard to predict, may
complicate further and that signs of its damaging effects — uncontrolled inflation,
disrupted food supplies, increased human displacement, exposed healthcare machinery,
stalled education levels and faltering job creation ecosystems
— are evident and testing the resilience of every nation.
Resilience is defined as the characteristic that makes it possible to
rebound into shape; it is the ability to withstand crises; it is the ability to face
uncertainties with curiosity and optimism. This capacity to rebound is becoming harder to
model or predict as the crises drivers are becoming harder to anticipate and increasingly
intermingled. While there is always room for debate, there can be no denying that, looking
back,
India has emerged far better in its handling of the Covid-19 crisis
from the humanitarian and economic perspectives than most developed economies. India has
been able to take a mature approach to the ongoing conflict and has been one of the most
aggressive nations in terms of establishing a renewable energy target for itself; while
doing all of this, India has also emerged as the fastest growing major economy.
The overarching takeaway is that despite global instability, India has
fared better than almost any other major nation. While there were situations over the past
24 months when it appeared that events were getting out of control, we must give credit
where credit is due India was able to bounce back each time, a testimony to our
nation's resilience. In my view, utopian as some may call it, India's resilience
comes from its historic culture that has been shaped across thousands of years a model of
co-existence that actually works and the philosophy of ‘vasudhaiva kutumbakam',
which means that the world is one family.
A culture of resilience
It is India's inherent resilience that provides our nation its
underlying optimism. My belief in our nation has never been higher. To use a cricketing
analogy, we are now playing on one of the strongest home grounds and on one of the firmest
pitches that has ever existed. This pitch is expected to remain firm for several decades.
Optimism comes from resilience.
Resilience comes from belief. And belief is optimism.
In our case, it is this resilience, optimism and belief that drives us.
The primary reason for the success of the Adani Group comes from our alignment with the
India growth story. Never have we shied from investing in India, never have we slowed our
investments, and never have we feared to enter adjacent sectors – our resilience
comes from this unshakeable belief and confidenceinthe our fellow Indians and the future
of India.
During the journey of more than 25 years, there were uncharted waters
we entered and multidimensional crises that we faced. While we may have stumbled a few
times, we were always able to get back on our feet. Our ability to rise after every
stumble meant we grew bigger and stronger by drawing on our experience. It is these
experiences that have enriched us with resilience and laid the foundation of our optimism.
At a fundamental level, our strategy is linked to the strategy of the
nation. Over the past decades, we have always believed in the policies announced by the
Government, have continued to invest through all economic cycles, watched for emerging
sectors critical for the country's growth and entered new sectors with a confidence
in our learning and operating abilities.
We have grown adjacency by adjacency without getting hung up on
textbook business models.
We have built infrastructure anticipating a far larger and greater
India; this confidence has paid dividends.
The sum of these investments of the past empowered us to address the
present crisis and set us up stronger to handle any new crisis in the future. It is this
future that unfolded over the period
2021-22. This was a year when we announced ourselves to the world. In
2021-22, our confidence in our ability was validated. Our belief in our past defines our
ability to believe in our future, translating into the big bets that we make.
Preparing to go ‘green'
The best recent evidence for our confidence and belief in the future
has been the USD 70 billion investment we announced in facilitating India's
‘green' transition. We are already one of the world's largest developers of
solar power. Our strength in renewables will empower us enormously in our effort to make
‘green' hydrogen, the fuel of the future; it will equip us to produce the least
expensive ‘green' electron and the least expensive hydrogen. We are leading the
race to transform India from a country that is over-reliant on imported oil and gas to a
country that can become a net exporter of clean energy. This would be a
‘never-done-before' transformation in fortunes in a stunningly short period of
time across the largest scale. This transformation will help reshape India's energy
footprint in an extraordinary way. While we are now a major global renewable energy
player, we made remarkable progress in several other industries. In one stroke, we have
become the largest airport operator in India.
Around the airports where we operate, we are engaged in the adjacent
business of building aerotropolises and creating localised community-based economic
centres. We have made entries in sectors ranging from data centres, super apps and
industrial clouds to defence and aerospace, metals and materials – all aligned with
the Government's vision of an Atmanirbhar Bharat. We continue to grow as builders of
India's infrastructure, winning some of the largest road contracts in the nation and
growing our already substantial market share in businesses like ports, logistics,
transmission and distribution, city gas and piped natural gas. The successful IPO of
Adani Wilmar made us the largest
FMCG company in the country and we are now the second largest cement
manufacturer in
India. This year, our combined Group market capitalisation exceeded USD
200 billion. We raised billions of dollars from the international markets a validation of
confidence in the India and Adani growth stories. This growth and success have been
recognised around the world. Foreign governments now come to us with proposals to work in
their geographies and help build their infrastructure.
The result is that in 2022 we laid the foundation to seek a broader
expansion beyond India's boundaries.
Robust results, record numbers
The growth in our market capitalisation has been supported by a robust
and sustained growth in our cash flows. Our focus on operational excellence and accretive
capacity addition delivered, across our portfolio, an
EBITDA growth of 26%. Portfolio EBITDA stood at H42,623 crore. This
growth was diversified and reflected across our businesses, the results speaking for
themselves.
Group highlights
• • Our Utilities portfolio grew 26%
• Our Transport and Logistics portfolio grew 19%
• Our FMCG portfolio grew 34%; and
• Our Incubator business, represented by AEL, grew 45%
The high growth of our incubator AEL provides the group with a robust
foundation for the continued development of new businesses for yet another big decade.
AEL's unique business model has no parallel and we intend to leverage this further.
Segment highlights
AGEL
• Adani Green Energy Limited added 1,940 MW operational
capacity in FY 21-22 (greenfield commissioning 200 MW and inorganic addition 1,740 MW)
• Adani Green Energy Limited's solar capacity utilisation
factor (CUF) improved 130 bps YoY to 23.8% and wind CUF improved 400 bps YoY to 30.8% in
FY 21-22
ATL
• Adani Transmission Limited added 1,104 ckm to its network,
reaching 18,795 ckm, and sold a record 7,972 million units during the year.
APSEZ
• Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone Limited cargo volume
grew 26% to 312 MMT in FY 21-22; the journey from
200 MMT to 300 MMT in cargo volume was achieved in the record time of
just three years.
• Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone Limited also handled
record container volume of 8.2 million TEUs, a growth of
14%
ATGL
• Adani Total Gas Limited added 117 CNG stations, 556
commercial, 154 industrial and 85,840 domestic customers, a combined volume of 697 MMSCM
(CNG+PNG)
Strategic highlights
• Adani Green Energy Limited completed the acquisition of
Softbank's 5 GW renewable energy portfolio
• Adani Enterprises Limited commenced operations of its
Bravus mine in Australia.
• Adani Enterprises Limited took over operations of the
Guwahati,
Jaipur and Thiruvananthapuram airports and completed the acquisitions
of MIAL and NMIAL. While we can look back and feel content, we are only now gathering
momentum. What we have built over two decades is India's largest integrated
infrastructure business based on a rapid extension into adjacent businesses. The result is
that this is now being transformed into an integrated ‘platform of platforms'
that combines energy with logistics. This is moving us closer to an unprecedented access
to the Indian consumer. I know of no company that has such a business model with potential
access to an unlimited B2B and
B2C market for the next several decades.
A landmark year
It is here that I also want to take a moment to reflect on 2022 as a
year with special personal meanings. It represents the
100th birth anniversary of my inspiring and role model father
Shri Shantilal Adani, and my 60th birthday. To mark this milestone, the
Adani family came together and decided to contribute H60,000 crore towards charitable
activities related to healthcare, education and skill development, especially for rural
India. These three areas should be seen holistically, rather than separately, because they
collectively form the drivers for an equitable and future-ready India. We have an
opportunity in India to decisively lift tens of millions of people permanently out of
poverty. We owe it to ourselves and our country to do everything we can to catalyse that
process. Our experience in large project planning and execution and the learnings from the
ongoing work done by the Adani Foundation will help us uniquely accelerate and implement
these programmes across societies that need them the most.
The road ahead
Getting back to the theme of optimism as a driving force for a society,
Martin Seligman, often referred to as the ‘father of positive psychology', wrote
in the Harvard Business Review that he came to his insights into the power of optimism
‘the long, hard way, through many years of research on failure and
helplessness.' Essentially, he discovered over several years of studies, that
resilient people develop the courage of interpreting setbacks as temporary, local and
changeable. A quote attributed to Winston
Churchill echoes Seligman's findings on resilience. "Success
is not final," Churchill is supposed to have said, "failure is not fatal: it is
the courage to continue that counts." The reason I have always been inspired by
writing and thinking around resilience is because as an entrepreneur, my philosophy has
always been to keep trying. I am an incurable optimist. My optimism is founded on my
belief in our ability to create a better future. This is why I always argue that India has
become one of the greatest countries in which to be an entrepreneur. The prospects and
potential for the future are dazzlingly bright. In India, I see a real relish to finally
reclaim our former economic stature and our position as a pivotal force in global affairs.
There will be bumps along the road, as has been the case in the past, and is expected to
be the case in the future. However, there cannot be any doubt that the largest
middle-class that will ever exist, augmented by an increase in the working age and
consuming population share, will have a positive impact on India's growth rates, much
in line with the demographic dividend that India enjoys.
I have no reason to believe that over the next two decades we will not
suitably address this challenge. It is a virtuous cycle that is driven by the growth in
the middle-class population and India today enjoys the world's firmest pitch on which
to bat.