Gautam Adani, Chairman, Adani Group, said on Wednesday his airport business will adopt a hub-and-spoke model to connect tier 1 cities to tier 2 and 3 cities.

“We see airports as a powerful engine to drive local economic development as well as act as a critical lever to help converge the tier 1 cities with the tier 2 and tier 3 cities in a hub-and-spoke model. This model is fundamental to enable greater equalisation of our increasing urban-rural divide as well as take advantage of the cost arbitrage that exists between the different locations to make us more competitive as a nation. This is critical for the creation of net new jobs. Given our deep infrastructure expertise, we are well positioned to help make this happen,” Adani said in a statement.

The statement comes as Adani Airports is set to acquire a controlling interest in Mumbai Airports from the GVK Group.

“The addition of the Mumbai International Airport and the Navi Mumbai International Airport to our existing portfolio of six airports provides us a transformational platform that will help shape and create strategic adjacencies for our other B2B businesses. This acquisition helps us redesign the way we will serve our customer base and bridge our B2C and B2B business models,” Adani said.

Need for more airports

From a medium to long-term perspective, Mumbai is well on its way to become one of the top five global metropolitan centres of the 21st century, Adani said. “It is expected to be the nation’s leading airport as well as a core domestic and international hub as passenger traffic across our country grows five-fold and India builds 200 additional airports to handle over 1 billion domestic and international passengers across tier 1, 2 and 3 cities, a majority of which will connect to Mumbai. Over this period, India’s top 30 cities are expected to each require two airports and Adani Airports sees itself well-positioned to help build the infrastructure platform required,” he said.

Adani Airports, a subsidiary of Adani Enterprises, won the mandate to modernise and operate six airports — Ahmedabad, Lucknow, Mangaluru, Jaipur, Guwahati and Thiruvananthapuram — through a global tender conducted by the Airports Authority of India (AAI). Subsequently, Adani Airports received the Letter of Award (LoA) for three airports — Ahmedabad, Lucknow and Mangaluru.

Airports enable speed and, it is airports around which one can catalyse real-estate and entertainment facilities, e-commerce and logistics capabilities, time-sensitive industrial ecosystems, aviation-linked business and put in place other innovative business concepts, said Adani.

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