Gautam Adani

Gautam Adani is the chairman of the Adani Group. In March, 2011 Forbes magazine ranked Adani as the 6th richest person in India and the 81st in its list of billionaires based on his estimated personal wealth of US $10 billion.

The Adani Group is a diversified company in India with, according to its website, "interests in Infrastructure, Power, Global Trading, Logistics, Energy, Port & SEZ, Mining, Oil & Gas, Agri Business, FMCG products, Real Estate Development, Bunkering". The firm earned $5.8bn in revenues in 2010. Adani Power Limited is the power business arm of Adani Group, with head office at Ahmedabad, Gujarat. The company is India's 3rd largest private power producer with capacity of 1980 megawatts (MW) and is heavily involved in building new coal-fired power stations.

Background
Adani worked in Mumbai as a diamond sorter for two years and then established his own diamond brokerage outfit at Zaveri Bazaar.

In 1981, one year later, his elder brother Mansukhbhai, bought a plastics unit in Ahmedabad and asked Gautam to run it. This marked the beginning of Adani's foray into global trading by beginning to import polyvinyl chloride (PVC), a key raw material for manufacturing plastics. After economic liberalisation policies in the 1990's, the import duty on various goods was slashed, and profits of Adani Exports, then his flagship company, grew immensely. In 1988 he set up Adani Enterprises as an import-export company. It imported PVC and took on the giant Reliance Industries which produced PVC in India. In 1993 the Gujarat government invited private companies to run the Mundra Port, and in 1995 the contract was awarded to Adani. In 2006, Mundra Port was developed into a Special Economic Zone.

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