Billionaire Gautam Adani is looking to outsource vast swathes of the group’s operations to its vendors while conserving management bandwidth for strategy, research and finance, following the global playbook of multinationals such as Apple and Hyundai, which rely heavily on contract manufacturing to scale rapidly. The move is part of a larger strategy involving internal talent and an easier organizational structure, two people aware of the development said.
The ports-to-renewable energy conglomerate is aggressively developing a third-party vendor ecosystem to take over manufacturing, logistics, engineering and other functions, the people said on the condition of anonymity. It is also compressing its corporate structure into three layers to speed up decision-making. It has also set up a programme to promote internal talent with an emphasis on prioritizing internal promotions over lateral hiring.
“Apple gets Gorilla Glass from Corning, screen from Samsung, camera parts from Sony, chips from TSMC, and it gives the parts to Foxconn to assemble. That’s why Apple could scale,” the person cited above said. “The Adani group is creating an extended enterprise environment like Apple has.”
, the richest Indian as per Bloomberg Billionaires Index, is himself overseeing the changes that have been in the works for over three years, the first person said. It was partly triggered by the group becoming too large to manage, raising concerns about a growth slowdown.
The Ahmedabad-based conglomerate has committed annual capital expenditure of over ₹2 trillion over the coming five years across its 10 listed companies and numerous unlisted businesses incubated under Ltd. It reported combined earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization of over ₹92,000 crore in the first nine months of fiscal year 2026 (FY26) across the group.
Apple’s playbook
According to one of the two people cited above, the conglomerate will oversee research and development and finance, and retain intellectual property rights like manufacturing designs. Initially, the group will ensure its partners’ profitability and establish offices and staff housing closer to its sites. It will also transfer its workforce to vendors where required, like in the case of manufacturing units or ground handling operations at ports, for a smooth transition.
A large number of site-level employees have been shifted to vendors in recent months, while many more are expected to follow. The employees continue to be part of “Adani’s extended enterprise environment,” the person cited above said, implying the transition won’t change their working conditions.
“Our endeavour is to work with a selected group of strong and reliable partners who can take responsibility for the entire task and complete it better, faster, and more effectively,” chairman Adani said in an address on Labour Day earlier this month, when he broadly outlined a transformation plan based on three pillars. “This is a change in mindset; this is a change in culture,” he said.
The Adani Group did not respond to Mint’s request for a comment.
Experts confirmed the ongoing global shift to a vendor-heavy model to improve scale and capital efficiency through third-party ecosystems, rather than directly owning every operational layer.
“It is encouraging to now see large Indian conglomerates making a similar strategic transition with growing confidence and sophistication,” said Monish G Chatrath, managing partner of MGC Global Risk Advisory, a risk management advisory firm. Chatrath, however, cautioned that such models have risk implications too. It becomes more challenging to ensure sound corporate governance across a decentralized ecosystem of contractors and service providers, he said.
“The most material exposures in such structures arise around third-party cyber vulnerabilities, and labour compliance across vendor chains, concentration risk within critical suppliers, cultural fragmentation, operational resilience and reputational contagion where a vendor lapse rapidly becomes an enterprise issue,” he said. This makes crucial the organization’s ability to institutionalize control across vendors without stifling agility, he said.
Brakes on lateral hiring
The Adani Group has also put a freeze on hiring experienced professionals from outside, and has decided to promote internal talent instead, a second person said. All group companies have been instructed to recruit through the group’s internal job portal instead of seeking lateral hires. If internal talent is unavailable, the hiring manager must get an exception for lateral hiring from Karan Adani, who heads group human resources in addition to leading Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone Ltd. Karan is the elder son of Gautam Adani.
“I wish for a time—very soon—when lateral hiring at the Adani Group stops completely, and we rely solely on homegrown talent,” the senior Adani said in his Labour Day address.
Lastly, to speed up decision-making, the group is pushing towards a three-layer reporting structure across the organization barring a few exceptions.
“The three-layer model aims to flatten the organization so that responsibility is clear and decisions can be made quickly,” Adani said in the same speech.
Multiple reporting layers are being compressed into each other to create a wider reporting span, with the intention of cutting down the layers between decision centres and decision makers, the two people said.
“The three-layer structure is that you have a head office layer, you have a site layer, and you have the direct shop floor layer. This means the shop floor layer can speak to the head office directly,” the first person quoted above said. “This requires a redesign of how HR works.”
Chatrath said that promoting internal talent carries lower execution risk due to employees’ familiarity with the group’s governance architecture, compliance frameworks and culture. However, excessive recycling of internal talent could gradually weaken outside-in perspective, he cautioned.
“The most resilient organizations are those that use internal mobility as a stabilizing core, while continuing to induct selective external talent in transformation, , cyber, analytics, ESG and change-management functions where fresh thinking and independent challenge remain strategically critical,” he said.