Gautam Adani, Founder and Chairman, Adani Group, heads the conglomerate which secured the world’s largest single-location copper smelter in Gujarat. His company signed contracts to buy 1.6 million tonnes a year of copper concentrate, which will expand to 1 million tonnes by March 2029 to cater for a forecast doubling of Indian copper demand by the end of the decade.

The first 500,000 tonnes of capacity at the $1.2 billion facility in Mundra, Gujarat, is set to start operations next month. Adani Enterprises the port-to-power conglomerate’s flagship company seeks resource security in critical minerals and is resuming capital expenditure now that its shares have stabilised after a short-seller attack in January 2023.

The smelter is starting up just as the global copper market experiences a collapse in the fees that processors charge miners in view of scarcity of the ore.