Adani Group chairman Gautam Adani has estimated India's economy to grow 10 times in the next 28 years - from about $3 trillion at present to $30 trillion by 2050. He also estimates India’s stock market capitalisation to touch $45 trillion mark by 2050.
“Following our independence, it took India almost 58 years to reach the 1-trillion- dollar GDP mark. It then took 12 years to achieve our 2nd trillion dollars – and thereafter, only five years to achieve the 3rd trillion dollars. This rate will further accelerate as the digital revolution kicks in and transforms every type of activity at a national scale,” Adani, who recently became the world’s second richest billionaire, said at the Forbes Global CEO conference in Singapore.
He added, “In 2021, India added a unicorn every nine days, and it executed the largest number of real-time financial transactions globally – a staggering 48 billion. This was three times greater than China and six times greater than the US, Canada, France, and Germany combined.”
Emphasising that India is in a bright spot even as major economies are struggling with recession fears, and impending war among other things, Adani reinstated that his port-to-power conglomerate will invest over $100 billion of capital in the next decade, of which 70 per cent has been earn-marked for the Energy Transition space.
“We are already the world’s largest solar player, and we intend to do far more. In this context, Adani New Industries is the manifestation of the bet we are making in the energy transition space. It is our commitment to invest 70 billion dollars in an integrated Hydrogen-based value chain,” he said.
“Therefore, in addition to our existing 20 GW renewables portfolio, the new business will be augmented by another 45 GW of hybrid renewable power generation spread over 100,000 hectares – an area 1.4 times that of Singapore.
This will lead to the commercialization of three million metric tons of green hydrogen. This multi-fold business will see us build three giga factories in India. We are in the process of building a 10 GW silicon-based photo-voltaic value chain that will be backwards integrated from raw silicon to solar panels, a 10 GW integrated wind-turbine manufacturing facility, and a 5 GW Hydrogen electrolyser factory.
Today, we can confidently state that we have a line of sight to first – become one of the least expensive producers of the green electron – and thereafter – the least expensive producer of green hydrogen. It is an absolute game changer for India and opens up the unprecedented possibility that India could one day become a net energy exporter,” added the business tycoon who also is one of the world’s largest thermal power producers.
Adani also said that the Group has ambitions in the space of Digital Transformation.
“The Indian Data Center market is witnessing explosive growth. This sector consumes more energy than any other industry in the world and therefore our move to build green data centres is a game-changing differentiator. We will interconnect these data centres through a series of terrestrial and globally linked undersea cables drawn at our ports and build consumer-based super-apps that will bring the hundreds of millions of Adani’s B2C consumers on one common digital platform,” he added.
According to Adani, once this is done, the monetization possibilities are endless. “We also just finished building the world’s largest sustainability cloud that already has a hundred of our solar and wind sites running on it – all off a single giant command and control centre that will soon be augmented by a global A-I lab. These are just a few of the adjacencies that are being mainstreamed at our digital businesses at Adani.”
In his speech, he also pointed out that many federal banks are doing the unthinkable – raising interest rates so much that they can crash an economy into recession. He also said that a war (Russia-Ukraine) has implications well beyond its borders, accelerating climate change challenges, and uncertainty about future pandemics - together - means we are in unchartered waters.
He also spoke about the Chinese economy and said that the neighbouring nation will feel increased isolation in future.
“I anticipate that China – that was seen as the foremost champion of globalization - will feel increasingly isolated. Increasing Nationalism, Supply Chain Risk mitigation, and Technology restrictions will have an impact. China’s Belt and Road initiative was expected to be a demonstration of its global ambitions, but the resistance now makes it challenging. And its housing and credit risks are drawing comparisons with what happened to the Japanese economy during the ‘lost decade’ of the 1990s. While I expect all these economies will readjust over time - and bounce back - the friction to the bounce-back looks far harder this time.”