First generation entrepreneur Grandhi Mallikarjuna Rao was also the first Indian businessman to enter the airport infrastructure sector. He bagged the contract to build a new airport in Hyderabad, the capital of his home state Andhra Pradesh in 2002, under the public-private-partnership model, two years before a Siemens-led consortium won a similar contract for a new Bangalore airport.
It was a bold step, but one which has yet to reward Rao. His GMR Infrastructure Ltd has, in joint ventures with different partners, developed and until recently ran four airports - the Rajiv Gandhi International Airport in Hyderabad, the Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi, the Sabiha Gokcen International Airport in Istanbul, Turkey, and the Ibrahim Nasir International Airport in Male, the Maldives. But GMR Infrastructure's airport vertical is bleeding, with losses of Rs 557.9 crore in 2011/12 and Rs 47.5 crore in the first half of the current fiscal year. The company, which also operates toll roads and power plants, closed fiscal year 2012 with losses of Rs 603.34 crore, on gross revenues of Rs 8,473 crore.
The situation worsened in late November, when the Maldives government unilaterally cancelled the contract for the Male airport it had signed with GMR in June 2010. The state-owned Maldives Airport Co. Ltd (MACL), which was running the airport earlier, took it over again. For the Male airport was profitable, indeed the most profitable of the four airports the company was running.
02/01/13 K.R. Balasubramanyam/Business Today
