Adani’s airport outlay plans at ₹60k crore in 10 years

Lucknow: The Adani Group will invest about ₹60,000 crore to expand the seven existing airports in its portfolio over the next 5-10 years, Karan Adani, MD of Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone Ltd, said.

About half of the investment would be pumped into terminal and runway capacity over five years, and the rest would be invested in city-side development of the airports over a period of 10 years, Adani said on the sidelines of an event.

These investments will be in addition to the ₹18,000 crore that the group plans to invest in Navi Mumbai airport.

Adani added that these investments will be funded through internal accruals of parent company Adani Enterprises Ltd, and the group has not made any firm plans on listing the airport subsidiary of the company, Adani Airport Holdings Limited, yet.

The Adani group operates airports in Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Lucknow, Mangaluru, Jaipur, Guwahati and Thiruvananthapuram. Barring Mumbai airport, which was acquired from the GVK group in 2021, the group won the rights to upgrade and operate the other six airports between 2020 and 2021 for a period of 50 years.

Adani was speaking on the sidelines of the inauguration of a new terminal at Lucknow airport by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

On Sunday, Modi inaugurated airport projects worth ₹9,800 crore from Azamgarh in UP. These include new terminal buildings of Pune, Kolhapur, Gwalior, Jabalpur, Delhi, Lucknow, Aligarh, Azamgarh, Chitrakoot, Moradabad, Shravasti and Adampur airports. He laid the foundation stones for new terminal buildings for Kadapa, Hubballi and Belagavi Airports.

Explaining the strategy for the airport’s business, Adani added that the group sees airports in smaller cities becoming hubs for international passengers.

“In coming times, we foresee non metros bypassing hubs and providing flyers direct connectivity across the world. Their connectivity within the country will also improve,” he said.

Currently, big metros serve as hubs for direct international connectivity out of India to distant continents. Tier-II cities are connected to nearby metro hubs, from where passengers take connecting flights to rest of the world.

This plan to develop smaller airports as international hubs is in sync with the government’s plan to make Indian airports—with the network connectivity of airlines like Air India and IndiGo—the hub for transfer passengers, who fly from one international airport to another foreign country via an airport in India. The government is also working on a hub policy to develop Delhi airport as the first hub airport in India.

As part of the strategy to meet its rising demand, the Adani group plans to more than double its airport capacity by 2040.

“The current capacity of our airports is 110 million passengers annually (MPA). This will be increased by up to three times. Lucknow has got a new terminal. Navi Mumbai will open next (by next March). Then Guwahati airport will get a new terminal. We are planning new terminals for Ahmedabad and Jaipur also. Overall, we are looking at a combined capacity of about 300 MPA by 2040,” Adani said.

The capacity will be grown in a phased manner. Lucknow Airport’s new terminal, for instance, has a capacity of 8 million passengers per annum currently, which will be increased to 13 million in the next phase and then to 38 million annually by 2035.

The group’s focus is also on developing the city side of airports, which will give a boost to its ancillary revenues. It will develop over 160 acres at Mumbai airport; 100 acres in Lucknow; 200 acres in Navi Mumbai, 17 acres in Jaipur and 2 acres in Thiruvananthapuram. 

The land on the city side of these airports will be developed to house businesses that are related to the aviation sector, such as hotels, offices of aviation companies, etc.