Adani’s $8 billion metals foray is hard to fathom

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Editor's note: Over the last couple of years, Gautam Adani’s diversification ambitions have seen his Adani group add airports, hydrogen and roads, among other verticals, to a long list of businesses and emerge as the second most valued conglomerate in the country, with only the Tata group ahead of it.  Some of these businesses have perplexed people like Bharat Shah, executive director of wealth management firm ASK Investment Managers. Keen to understand the billionaire entrepreneur’s strategy, on 4 May, Shah logged in to the analyst call of Adani Enterprises, the group’s flagship that also incubates its new businesses. “Are we not attempting too much?” he asked chief financial officer Robbie Singh. Not stopping there, he went on to dwell on his concerns. “Are our entire hands full and you think that a possible risk of attempting way too much whereby… some of it starts becoming weak because of the complexity and very large and too many activities we seek to do.” In his reply, Singh indicated that there was a method to the diversification. In its new businesses, he said, the Adani …