The group currently runs seven airports in India, including Mumbai CSMIA. Another new airport, in Navi Mumbai, will comes under the group’s airport portfolio starting October this year.
According to Jeet Adani (Gautam Adani’s son), this capex will be infused into infra and real estate development. There is currently no plan to spread this business to other countries because the potential in India itself is immense, he told ToI’s Saurabh Sinha.
The new airport plan will be a five-year rolling programme, Adani said. Over the next five years, the group’s precise total investment in the airport ecosystem — infrastructure plus real estate — will be Rs 95,000-96,000 crore, he added.
A majority of this investment will go into Navi Mumbai Airport and Mumbai Airport — basically into real estate in these two entities, Jeet Adani informed.
The other major parts of the plan include new terminals at airports in Ahmedabad, Jaipur and Thiruvananthapuram, etc, over the next four years. Besides, the new terminal in Lucknow will see expansion. A new terminal at Guwahati is also ready and will be commissioned this October-November, Adani said.The business has no immediate plans for setting up shop abroad as there are major opportunities in India itself, Adani said. According to him, “We keep getting feelers from abroad. But at the end of the day, it’s about our management bandwidth and where do we want to keep our capital.””We believe India will see some serious growth in the next 10-15 years. There’s so much growth opportunity here with 26 airports already identified for being developed PPP way. Our focus is on going deeper in India and establishing a broader presence here, rather than going abroad,” he added.
New plan for Mumbai
Giving a peek into the group’s plan for Navi Mumbai, Adani said phase I and II have been clubbed, and that the airport will open with an initial capacity of 2 crore passengers annually (CPA).
“This has been built with a capex of Rs 19,000 crore. We have already started work on T2 for Navi Mumbai International Airport (NMIA) which could either be 3-CPA capacity at Rs 30,000 crore or 5-CPA capacity with a capex of Rs 40-45,000 crore,” Adani said.
“That decision will be taken shortly and T2 construction work will start in 6-12 months. Our overall capex on NMIA that will take it to the ultimate capacity of 9 CPA will be Rs 1 lakh crore. A completely new T1 at Mumbai CSMIA will be built by 2032 at a cost of Rs 5,000 crore,” he told the newspaper.
For the project, the group will put in its own equity. According to Adani, “Equity we will put on our own. We have to refinance NMIA. The same lenders have already expressed willingness to participate in the next round. Our philosophy is to pre-invest in infra because we are willing to take a position on the growth of the aviation sector and growth of the economy of the cities we are in. The sector has some real tailwinds.”
Big aviation bull
Explaining why he is so bullish on aviation, Adani affirmed that the group is “here just as an airport operator but are here to drive the entire ecosystem forward.”
“It is not a fight between airline and airport operators. Collectively, our aviation ecosystem has to get the traffic currently transiting between India and rest of the world through nearby hubs in the Gulf, Southeast Asia and even Europe (for North America market),” he said.
“Those places have a deep integration between airports and airlines, which as of now is not there in India. Fortunately as a group, we have fantastic relationship with IndiGo and the Tatas. We have spoken to both and have asked them to include us into their planning and be a part of our planning,” he added.
