Daybreak - Adani made his billions from ports. His new bet is far from the shore

Episode Date: July 13, 2026

In October last year, a ship owned by Adani Ports slowed to less than one knot near Malta. It held that position for over seven days, directly above the cables linking Malta to Sicily. It was no accident. India's largest private port operator has quietly built a fleet of more than a hundred vessels across 12 countries. Their job is servicing the world's offshore energy infrastructure. The business grew 134% in a single year. Ports made Adani rich. But there are only so many ports you can build. What the conglomerate does next may depend on waters far from any dock. Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

In October last year, in the sea between Sicily and Malta, a ship called Energy Savannah slowed down to less than one knot. That is slower than my walking pace. And then something even more curious happened. The ship stayed there for more than seven days. It was not a dock or a port. It was just a narrow strait of the Mediterranean, directly above the seabed cables and electricity links that connect Malta to Italy. It only docked three times that month, very briefly, at the Maltese port of Marsax Lock. And then it went straight back out into the sea again.

What is even more interesting is who owns it. Energy Savannah, which is soon to be renamed as Astro Atlas, actually belongs to Adani ports in special economic zone or APSEZ, which is India's largest private port operator. For nearly three decades, Adani's port. port business began at the exact moment that a ship docked and the cargo started moving. But now, one of its newest vessels seems to be in no hurry to reach a port at all. Now, if you follow its roots long enough like my colleague the Kenreporter Saakshi Sadashiv did,

a pattern emerges. The ship loops around the North Sea, the world's busiest offshore energy basin, and it lingers in the waters between Turkey and the eastern Mediterranean. These happen to be among the most geopolitically contested subsea corridors on the planet. And here is the reason why. The world's energy systems are slowly sliding off land and into the sea. Think LNG terminals, wind farms that are sprawled across the European waters, and gas fields that sit even further from the shore. Even the cables carrying electricity and internet between countries run along the ocean floor.

India, like many, depends on this deep sea world more and more. But it owns almost none of it. Adani wants to change that. Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken. I'm your host Nick Dharma and I don't chase the news cycle. Instead, every day of the week, my colleague Rachel Vargis and I will come to you with one business story that's worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Tuesday, the 14th of July.

To understand what energy savannah is really up to, my colleague Saoqshi began keeping a tab on its movements. And instead of focusing on where it sails, she focused more on where it stops. And that is because this ship is a part of what is called marine services, where the job site is the water itself. Basically, offshore, things constantly need to be installed, repaired, inspected, surveyed, connected and maintained. Somebody has to bring the equipment and the engineers to that exact spot on the ocean and stay until the work is done. Energy Savannah is built for this. It is a 100 metre long vessel that can operate at depths beyond 3,000 meters, which means 3 kilometres of water between the hull of the ship and the seabed.

So a ship holding position for a week is basically a ship at work. And it chose one of the busiest energy. work sites on the planet. You see, after Russia invaded Ukraine, Europe scrambled for new energy sources. And this trait sits at the crossroads of that effort. Gas from North America passes through it. Around it lie offshore gas fields, power interconnectors, submarine cables and terminals for LNG. The ship's wider route tells the same story. It spends most of its time in the North Sea, the world's busiest offshore energy basin and around Turkey and the eastern Mediterranean among the most contested undersea corridors anywhere.

Adani assembled this capability piece by piece. It entered the business in 2022 by acquiring ocean sparkle and today it runs 136 vessels across 12 countries. In 2024, it also bought UAE-based Astro Offshore, adding more. more than 20 vehicles and a footprint across Asia and Africa. Energy Savannah is its ground vessel. In the last few months, APSCZ entered Europe's deep water market through a partnership with Oceaniering International,

which is an American underwater engineering specialist, and it won a 10-year contract serving Argentina's first project to export LNG. The business is still small, just over 8% of, APSEZ's revenue, but it grew 134% in a single year, more than doubling. And the income is genuinely external, earned entirely from third-party customers rather than Adani's own ports. On the April earnings call, Chief Executive Ashwani Gupta explained the appeal. These vessels sit on mid-to-long-term contracts in a business not as cyclic to trade as compared

to the shipping business. Which also raises a question. Adani already has a monopoly over India's port infrastructure. Why does it need to do this at all? To find out, stay tuned. It is because the port's business, for all its strengths, has a ceiling. And Adani may be closer to it than its size suggests. A retired ports and shipping executive from a public sector shipyard

explained the trade-off to the ken. They said, ports behave like nothing. monopolies with long concessions and cash flows that you can predict years ahead. But building one demands coastline, government approvals, vast land, environmental clearances, and a hinterland full of cargo. Basically, in his words, there are only so many ports that you can build. Adani has built them for nearly three decades since Mundra and Gujarat and now runs 15 ports and terminals handling a little over a quarter of India's cargo and no. nearly half of its containers.

When you already control that much, the next quarter is far harder to find. A senior offshore industry executive told the Ken that ports also rise and fall with Indian trade, while marine services earn globally, often in dollars and on long-term contracts. So offshore services actually invert the constraints of the port's business. These companies get paid each time something at sea needs work. So when the world spends more offshore, they earn more. And the same vessel can earn off Argentina one year in the North Sea the next. And the retired executive actually summed it up.

Think of it as selling picks and shovels during a gold rush. The same model has produced giants like Italy's Sapim, which operates in more than 50 countries. India has barely entered the water. It's exclusive economic zone, which is the stretch of the ocean where it holds the right to resources, spans over 2 million square kilometres beside 11,000 kilometre coastline. And yet, Anitayyayog report found that the country has hardly begun to use it. The offshore story so far belongs to state institutions like the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation or ONGC and the Navy.

Adani appears to be the first Indian conglomerate seriously attempting to change that. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken, India's first subscriber-focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample of a subscriber-only offerings and a full subscription offers daily, long-form feature stories, newsletters and a whole bunch of premium podcasts. To subscribe, head to the ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the website. Today's episode was hosted and produced by my colleagues Niktha Sharma and edited by Rajiv Sien.