AAHL now owns 74% of MIAL. The culmination of the deal makes the Adani Group India’s biggest private airport operator. It already operates three other airports in Ahmedabad, Lucknow and Mangaluru and will shortly take over those at Guwahati, Thiruvananthapuram and Jaipur. Adani’s airports account for 25% of airport footfalls and 33% of air cargo.
Adani said it will start work on the Navi Mumbai airport in another month, achieve financial closure in 90 days and aims to make it operational by 2024.
“With India becoming to be the world’s third largest aviation market by 2024, the addition of the Mumbai International Airport to the Adani Group’s existing portfolio of six airports, and thereafter the operationalization of the greenfield Navi Mumbai International Airport Limited (NMIAL) provides a transformational aviation platform allowing the Adani Group to interlink its B2B and B2C business as well as create several strategic adjacencies for the Group’s other B2B businesses,” said a statement from the conglomerate, which is also India’s biggest sea port operator.
“AAHL will begin the construction of the Navi Mumbai International Airport next month and complete the financial closure in the next 90 days. This new international airport will be commissioned in 2024,”
“Our larger objective is to reinvent airports as ecosystems that drive local economic development and act as the nuclei around which we can catalyse aviation-linked businesses. These include metropolitan developments that span entertainment facilities, e-commerce and logistics capabilities, aviation dependent industries, smart city developments, and other innovative business concepts,” said chairman Gautam Adani
Adani Enterprises as an incubator owns 100% of its airports holding company, Adani Airport Holdings Ltd. Adani Airport Holdings has already acquired 23.5% of Mumbai International Airport Ltd (MIAL) from shareholders Bidvest and Airports Company South Africa, according to the annual report.
Now it has taken over another 50.5% additional shares through the conversion of majority shareholder GVK’s debt into equity shortly. MIAL owns 74% of the Navi Mumbai airport, for whose takeover it recently received a nod from the nodal body CIDCO.
According to the latest annual report of Adani Enterprises, the total debt of MIAL taken over by Adani was Rs 11,139 crore as of March. Of that, Adani is aiming to refinance Rs 8,250 crore (about $1.1 billion), a move that will reduce funding costs by at least 1 percentage point on a fully hedged basis, sources familiar with the matter told ET recently.
It has made an additional capital commitment of Rs 2,807 crore.
