Reduce operational costs to make industry sustainable, benefit passengers: Adani aviation vertical CEO

The aviation arm of the $30 billion apples-to-airports conglomerate Adani Group is looking to cut its operational costs between 30 and 50 per cent over the next five to 10 years.

“We will plough back these savings and you can just imagine the upside to passenger growth if people are able to pay 20 per cent less, for instance,” CEO of Adani Airport Holdings, Arun Bansal said at an aviation summit organised by the think tank CAPA India in New Delhi Wednesday.

Bansal asserted the company had brought about a fundamental change in the infrastructure sector by planning long-term over a multi-year period.

“If the passenger count is going to be 1.4 billion in another 20-30 years and we are going to handle 350-400 million of that traffic, how do we make our terminals’ capacity ready for that? We do our master plan with that mission,” remarked Bansal.

Bansal informed that this strategy to plan proactively would provide them with operational and financial efficiency upfront over the next two to three decades.

“Any consumer business thrives on a scale and some businesses need a global scale. But the Indian market is big enough to enable us to create capabilities and capacity,” declared Bansal.

He added that despite the presence of several global vendors and suppliers, the Indian aviation industry had been taken for granted in the last 30 years.

“The price of buying software was 75-80 per cent higher simply because we didn’t have the capability to know what we were buying,” disclosed Bansal.

He suggested that airports could substantially reduce their software and licensing costs by transitioning to a unified, open-source system in place of separate technology platforms. He also informed the company was investing heavily in digitalisation, including getting an app developed in India at five times lesser cost compared to the global average.

The company which is also building the greenfield Navi Mumbai International Airport near India’s commercial capital stuck to its commitment to start operations by the end of 2024 for the first phase of the facility. Launching with an annual capacity of 20 million passengers, Bansal said this would be progressively increased to 70 million in four phases.