Adani Airports expects total passenger traffic across its eight airports, including the soon-to-be-operational Navi Mumbai International Airport, to reach 120 million next year, a senior company official has said, underscoring the group’s focus on India’s fast-growing domestic aviation market.
In an interaction with PTI ahead of the start of commercial operations at Navi Mumbai International Airport on 25 December, Adani Airport Holdings Ltd director Jeet Adani said there is “no need” to scout for airport assets abroad as the company’s priority is firmly on domestic expansion.
“Last year, I believe, we had close to 89-90 million (passengers from seven airports). I think this year, we will be somewhere close to 100 million,” Adani said.
Next year, he said, traffic will see a sharper rise with the addition of Navi Mumbai airport.
“So, we will go up to 120 million (passengers),” he said.
At present, Adani Airport Holdings Ltd operates seven airports: Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Thiruvananthapuram, Jaipur, Lucknow, Guwahati and Mangalore.
Navi Mumbai International Airport, inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in October this year, will become the eighth airport under the company when it begins operations later this month.
The greenfield airport, the second in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region after Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport, is being developed in phases by NMIAL, a special purpose vehicle in which the Adani Group holds a 74 per cent stake, while the remaining 26 per cent is held by the Maharashtra government’s land development authority CIDCO.
Spread over 1,160 hectares, Navi Mumbai International Airport, once all phases are completed, will have four terminals with the capacity to handle 90 million passengers annually and a cargo capacity of 3.25 million metric tonnes, positioning it among the largest aviation hubs in Asia.
Calling the new airport “quite important” to the overall ecosystem, Adani said, “Even for Adani Airports, this is going to be our largest asset as of yet. And by the time this airport becomes a 90 million passenger airport, hopefully the Adani Airports platform will be crossing 500 million in total passengers being served every year.”
“And I truly think that is possible. With the way the aviation market is growing, people are flying, year-on-year; we are seeing passenger growth of mid-teens up to double-digit growth rates. And I personally believe this will continue,” he said.
According to him, the biggest challenge to sustaining this growth is aircraft availability. “The biggest challenge I see to this (passenger growth) is just the supply constraint in terms of new planes coming in, which we see early signs are now converting to positive early signs. But I think that’s the biggest challenge here,” he said.
Adani said the Navi Mumbai airport has been planned, built and designed keeping in mind the “new age of airports” and the “new age of India” within the global airport ecosystem.
“We are starting the first phase with 20 million passengers. As we go on, we are starting work on the next phase immediately after the full-fledged stabilisation of this phase, which is somewhere in the next year... so we have to make a decision between 30-50 million passengers for the new terminal,” he said.
India is among the world’s fastest-growing domestic civil aviation markets, with airlines expanding their fleets to meet rising demand and new airports coming up across the country.
Adani said India has clear ambitions to emerge as a global aviation hub.
“We truly believe that the way the entire infrastructure planning and design has been undertaken, not just for this but the next three terminals that are yet to be built, will make sure that Navi Mumbai airport becomes a global aviation hub for Indian airlines,” he said.
Highlighting the technological backbone of the new facility, he said the airport’s back-end infrastructure has been developed from the ground up.
“We have our own database and workflow management platform, which is the centre point behind creating all the functionality in this airport,” Adani said.
“What this means for a common passenger is that they will actually have access to information at the same time and with the same accuracy as that of an operator sitting inside the Airport Operations Control Centre (AOCC),” he added.