Niranjan Hiranandani announces son Darshan as successor to his real estate empire

Property tycoon Niranjan Hiranandani has announced son Darshan Hiranandani as successor to his multi-billion dollar real estate business spanning residential, commercial, warehousing and other segments.

Holding a masters degree with a major in entrepreneurship and finance from the Rochester Institute of Technology, 36-year-old Darshan already heads the Hiranandani group's real estate business in Dubai besides H-Energy - the group's energy venture.

"Darshan will be my successor in real estate. He is going to be the second best till I am around," Hiranandani, founder and MD, Hiranandani Group said at a press conference in Mumbai, clearly indicating his own continued involvement with the group's operations. Darshan is now the group CEO.

The Hiranandani Group also announced its foray into the data centre parks business with a new arm -- Yotta Infrastructure. The managed data centre service provider will design, build and operate large-scale hyper density data centres for companies, with the first one set to get operational in Panvel, Navi Mumbai, before this fiscal. The company is setting up another one in Chennai.

While the unlisted firm's revenues are not known, Hiranandani said his firm had done as much business in the last five years as it had done in the preceding 25 years. "We are growing steadily," he said.

In 2009, Hiranandani had a dispute with his London-based daughter Priya Vandrevala, who had accused her father and brother of violating a development deal. In 2016, the London Court of International Arbitration ruled in her favour, asking them to pay Rs 360 crore to Priya. The matter has been settled now.

With a personal net worth of Rs 7,880 crore, Niranjan Hiranandani ranked sixth in the Grohe Hurun India Real Estate Rich List 2018. He shares the rank with brother Surendra Hiranandani, with whom he co-founded the Hiranandani Group in 1978.

Surendra Hiranandani now runs his independent venture - House of Hiranandani Group. The brothers continue to jointly own some assets in Powai, a suburban Mumbai township they started building in 1989 on a former quarry.  The duo sold the commercial and retail assets in Powai to Brookfield Asset Management for a billion dollar in 2016.

Besides multiple projects in Maharashtra, the Hiranandani group owns over 1800 acres land across India. It is now aiming to use some parts of this land bank to set up a robust data centres business.

"We envision a huge opportunity with data localisation and protection act to be announced by the Government to regulate the data management business. This will give a big impetus to data storage. Our group is committed to be one of the big players in the data centre space," he said.

India has the cheapest data consumption cost per GB and is the largest consumer of data in the world. "At Yotta, our vision is to offer the cheapest data storage infrastructure per GB in the world.  We will deliver this solution to all entities, global and domestic, in our first site itself at Panvel by Dec 2019," Darshan Hiranandani said.

Yotta Infrastructure will be driven by Sunil Gupta as the Managing Partner and CEO, who has set up over 15 hyper scale hyper density data centres across India. Yotta's data centre parks will be spread over 50 acres near major international fiber landing stations with server hall capacity of over 60,000 racks and 500 MW power.

"We shall offer unlimited scalability of co-location space and power at our Data Centre parks to OTT players like Google, AWS, Microsoft, Alibaba, Tencent, Netflix, Facebook and Apple for their cloud availability zones and offer enhanced cost effectiveness," Gupta said.

Yotta will also launch hybrid multi-cloud, managed IT, security and connectivity services for enterprises including banks, retail, media and manufacturing and new age companies in the space of SaaS, IoT, Machine Learning, AI and Big Data.

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