Billionaire Gautam Adani’s flagship firm reported a quarterly profit on the back of improved revenues across businesses as it grapples with the fallout from a bruising short seller report.
Adani Enterprises Ltd., based in the tycoon’s home city of Ahmedabad in western India, posted net income of 8.2 billion rupees ($99.1 million) for the quarter ended Dec. 31, it said in a filing Tuesday, compared with a loss of 116.3 million rupees in the same period last year. There weren’t enough brokerages tracking the company to derive an average profit forecast.
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Revenue at the flagship of Adani’s ports-to-power conglomerate rose 42% to 266.1 billion rupees, the filing said. Total costs climbed 37% to 261.7 billion rupees.
The earnings will be a tailwind for Adani Enterprises, which has a motley mix of businesses spanning coal mining, airports, data centers, digital services and metals. Known for incubating new Adani businesses that are then spun off, the company has weathered a brutal past few weeks that saw its $2.5 billion share sale shelved and its stock plunge after US-based Hindenburg Research accused it of accounting fraud and stock manipulation in a Jan. 24 report.
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Despite Adani Group denying the allegations, it triggered a selloff that had eroded $127 billion from the conglomerate’s market value as of Monday. Hindenburg said in its report that it had taken a short position in Adani’s companies through US-traded bonds and non-Indian-traded derivatives.