Gautam Adani

Gautam Adani is an Indian tycoon who is the chairman of the Adani Group, a leading conglomerate company. Adani Group (usually called Adani Enterprises Ltd.) is an Indian conglomerate company headquartered in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. The core businesses of the group are commodities trading, edible oil manufacturing, Mundra port operations and distribution of natural gas. Adani Group has more than 50 companies under it.

In March, 2011 Forbes magazine announced that Adani is one of the richest persons in India with a personal wealth of US $5.4 billion. He is the first billionaire from the city of Ahmedabad.

Adani set out for Mumbai to make a living with only a few hundred rupees at the age of 18. He enrolled at Gujarat University for bachelor of commerce degree but ultimately dropped out. Adani used to be an average student in academic.

He worked in Mumbai as a diamond sorter at Mahindra Bros. After working there for two years, Adani, 20 at the time, set up his own diamond brokerage outfit at Zaveri Bazaar and made his first lakh.

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. They first began to import polyvinyl chloride (PVC), a key raw material for manufacturing plastics. After the economic liberalization, the import duty on various goods was slashed, and profits of Adani Exports, then his flagship company, grew immensely.

In 1988 he set up an import-export company called Adani Enterprises. 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 given to Adani. In 2006, Mundra Port was developed into a Special Economic Zone.