Tamil Nadu Global Investors Meet: Adani Group, HCL, MRF, ITC pledge Rs 30,000 crore investment

India’s top industrial houses including Adani Group, HCL, MRF and ITC among others have pledged investments worth over Rs 30,000 crore in Tamil Nadu, on first day of the state’s first-ever Global Investor Meet (GIM) on Wednesday.

Leading the investments is Adani Group which would invest between Rs 10,000 and 15,000 crore in the state to set up power plants and ports. Gautam Adani, chairman of Adani Group said that Tamil Nadu offers tremendous potential and that the company is setting up a 650 MW solar plant, likely to be operational by March 2015. “We are now investing in port and non-renewable power projects (thermal),” he said.

Shiv Nadar, founder of HCL, said that so far the company has invested around Rs 6,000 crore in Tamil Nadu. “We expect to invest $1 billion over the next five years in Tamil Nadu,” Nadar said. The money will used to set up new centres at Madurai and Tiruneveli.

Tamil Nadu is the brain centre for HCL, he said. Of the total 1,10,000 employees the company has, about 75,000 are in India. Of this about 35,000 are in Tamil Nadu, said Nadar, who hails from the state.

Tyre major MRF’s chairman K M Mammen said that the company is planning to invest around Rs 4,500 crore at Perambalur, Tamil Nadu. It will be the biggest plant ever for the company. It will make tyres for two-wheelers, cars, and truck, he said. Mammen declined to give details on the capacity of the proposed plant.

ITC’s Chairman YC Deveshwar said out of ITC’s Rs 25,000 crore investment plan, Tamil Nadu’s book value is about Rs 2,400 crore. “The latest of these investments was ITC Grand Chola,” he said.

Deveshwar said ITC would invest Rs 2,500 crore as soon as the company starts getting permisssion for its projects. “We have a Rs 800 crore food processing plant in Trichy. If that is quickly cleared and if we get the right incentives according to the industrial policy, we will continue to invest, he added. He said that ITC also wants to invest more in a hotel project at Coimbatore,” he added.

ITC Limited