Since 1890

Five Generations,
One House

The Currimjee enterprise has traded continuously through British colonial administration, two world wars, the collapse of the sugar economy, national independence and the digital revolution. This is how a single trading counter in Port Louis became an institution.

The third generation of the Currimjee family photographed at a Currimjee Group milestone event in Mauritius
The Long View

What 135 Years Actually Requires

Longevity in business is not a passive achievement. A firm that has survived since 1890 has been obliged to reinvent its product, its market and frequently its entire reason for existing — not once but repeatedly. The Currimjee house has done so at least four times, and each reinvention was undertaken while the previous business was still generating comfortable profits. That is the harder version of change: the kind that is chosen rather than forced.

Consider what the firm has had to absorb. The transition from sail to steam to container shipping, which rewrote the economics of island trading. Two world wars that severed supply lines. The end of empire and the creation of an independent Mauritian state in 1968. The collapse of preferential sugar arrangements. The arrival of the export processing zone. Currency reform, exchange controls, liberalisation, and finally the digital transformation of commerce itself.

Any one of these could have ended the enterprise. Most Mauritian firms trading in 1890 no longer exist. What separated this house was a structural decision taken early and defended since: the family would remain one owner, not several competing ones, and the business would remain a going concern rather than an estate to be divided.

The academic literature on family firms puts the survival rate to the third generation at roughly ten to fifteen per cent. To the fourth, low single digits. To the fifth, statistically negligible. The Currimjee Group's presence in that final category is the single most remarkable fact about it — more remarkable, arguably, than any individual business within it.

1890Founded in Port Louis
135+Years of Continuous Trading
5Generations of Stewardship
7+Sectors of Operation Today
The Chronology

From a Trading Counter to a Regional Group

Five distinct eras, each defined by a different answer to the question of what the house was for.

  1. 1890 – 1920s

    The Founding Generation — Trade

    Currimjee Jeewanjee establishes a general merchandise business in Port Louis. The model is classic merchant trading: import, hold stock, extend credit, settle promptly. The firm builds the commercial reputation that will serve as collateral for the next century. Mauritius in this period is a sugar colony of a few hundred thousand people, entirely dependent on maritime links to Europe, India and South Africa.

  2. 1920s – 1960s

    The Second Generation — Representation

    The house moves from opportunistic trading to formal agency and distribution, becoming the Mauritian representative for international manufacturers and brands. This shift is consequential: an agency business requires warehousing, credit management, sales infrastructure and after-sales service. The firm stops being a trader and becomes an operating company. It trades through the Second World War, wartime shortages and the profound uncertainty of the late colonial period.

  3. 1960s – 1990s

    The Third Generation — Diversification

    Mauritius becomes independent in 1968 and immediately confronts the fragility of a single-crop economy. The Currimjee house, now led by the third generation including Bashirali Currimjee, diversifies aggressively — into industry, consumer goods manufacture and distribution, energy and, decisively, telecommunications. The 1989 launch of Emtel is the defining act of this era and arguably of the firm's entire history.

  4. 1990s – 2010s

    The Fourth Generation — Institutionalisation

    With scale comes the need for structure. Operating businesses are organised into defined clusters with their own boards and professional management. External expertise is recruited. Governance is formalised, the family's ownership role is separated from executive authority, and the Group develops the reporting discipline of a large corporate rather than a private house. Real estate, hospitality and financial services are added.

  5. 2010s – Present

    The Fifth Generation — Digital & Public

    The Group moves up the value chain from infrastructure into services and digital platforms. Emtel Limited is admitted to the Stock Exchange of Mauritius, converting the family's most ambitious private venture into a publicly owned company. The fifth generation enters the business, and the enterprise begins the process of proving it can outlive the leaders who made it significant.

Bashirali Currimjee, custodian of the Currimjee heritage, in a formal portrait

Bashirali Currimjee — the third-generation figure whose telecom decision redefined what the house was capable of.

The Founding Name

The company still trades under the founder's own name — Currimjee Jeewanjee & Company Limited. In an era of rebranding and corporate abstraction, retaining the name of the man who arrived in 1890 is a deliberate governance signal: the house is accountable to its origins.

The Mechanism

Why This House Survived When Others Did Not

Family business scholarship identifies a consistent set of failure modes. It is instructive to read the Currimjee structure as a set of deliberate defences against each of them.

Failure Mode 01

Fragmentation of Ownership

The usual outcome: each generation divides the estate among heirs until the firm is a collection of small, undercapitalised competing interests, and eventually a family dispute resolved in court.

The defence here: the house is held together as a single ownership block. Family members hold participation in the whole rather than title to pieces. This preserves the balance sheet capacity required to attempt things like a national telecom network — which no divided fragment could ever have financed.

Failure Mode 02

Birthright Management

The usual outcome: operating companies are run by relatives whose qualification is descent. Competent non-family executives leave. Performance decays quietly for a decade before anyone admits the cause.

The defence here: explicit separation of ownership from management. Operating businesses are led by career professionals accountable to boards. Family members who work in the Group are expected to earn their positions on the same terms as anyone else.

Failure Mode 03

Extraction Over Reinvestment

The usual outcome: as the family grows, dividend demands rise faster than earnings. Capital expenditure is deferred. The business becomes an income annuity and slowly loses competitiveness to reinvesting rivals.

The defence here: a strong cultural and structural bias toward reinvestment. Earnings from mature businesses have consistently funded entry into new ones — trading funded industry, industry funded telecom, telecom funded digital and property.

Failure Mode 04

Strategic Nostalgia

The usual outcome: the family remains emotionally attached to the founding business long after its economics have deteriorated, and subsidises decline out of sentiment.

The defence here: a demonstrated willingness to reinvent. The house has changed what it does roughly once a generation. Trading was not preserved as a museum piece; it was evolved into distribution, then into manufacturing and services, then into infrastructure.

Bashirali Currimjee at a Currimjee Group brand milestone event in Mauritius

A Group milestone event — the transmission of values in a family firm happens as much in public ritual as in private instruction.

“We are not the owners of this house. We are the generation currently responsible for it.”
The Currimjee Stewardship Principle
Transmission

The Values That Travel Between Generations

Capital transfers easily between generations. Judgement does not. The persistent problem in family enterprise is that the conditions which produced the founder's discipline — scarcity, risk, personal liability — are precisely the conditions the founder works to eliminate for their descendants. Each successive generation therefore inherits the assets without the education that produced them.

The Currimjee response has been to make the values explicit rather than assumed, and to attach them to specific behaviours rather than abstract statements.

  • Integrity as collateral. In a market this small, the firm's word is its balance sheet. Commitments are honoured even when circumstances change and the cost is real.
  • Long-term orientation. Decisions are assessed on their effect over decades. Short-term optimisation at the expense of durability is treated as a failure of judgement, not a clever trade.
  • Respect for the operator. The person running the warehouse, the network or the plant holds knowledge the boardroom does not. Decisions are tested against operational reality before they are announced.
  • National alignment. The Group's prosperity is inseparable from the island's. Businesses that extract value from Mauritius without adding capability to it are considered strategically as well as ethically unsound.
  • Institutional humility. No individual, including the Chairman, is larger than the house. Structures are built specifically so that the enterprise does not depend on any single person.
  • Quiet execution. The firm has consistently preferred to be judged on what it has built rather than on what it has announced.
Case Study

Continuity Under Pressure: The Sugar Reckoning

The most instructive test of the Currimjee model came not from a decision the family made but from one made in Brussels. For decades, Mauritian sugar enjoyed guaranteed access to European markets at preferential prices under successive trade arrangements. Those preferences underwrote the island's rural employment, its foreign exchange earnings and a substantial share of its commercial credit system.

When European sugar regime reform progressively removed those preferences, the price Mauritius received fell sharply. Estates consolidated, mills closed, and tens of thousands of livelihoods connected to cane were placed at risk. For a domestic trading and distribution business, the transmission mechanism was direct: rural incomes fall, consumer demand contracts, receivables lengthen and bad debts rise.

The house came through the period intact for a structural reason. By the time the sugar reckoning arrived, its earnings were no longer concentrated in businesses that depended on rural consumption. Telecommunications revenue — recurring, subscription-based, and substantially insulated from agricultural cycles — had become a stabilising force in the Group's finances.

This is the practical payoff of diversification undertaken early. The 1989 telecom decision is usually described as visionary because of what it created. It deserves equal credit for what it prevented: it gave a 120-year-old Mauritian trading house a source of income that did not care what happened to the price of sugar.

The Lesson

Diversification is often criticised as a lack of focus. In a small, open, shock-exposed economy it is closer to insurance — and the premium must be paid years before the claim is made.

The House Today

An Enterprise Designed for the Next Hundred Years

The Currimjee Group of the present bears no operational resemblance to the merchant firm of 1890, and that is precisely the point. What has been transmitted across five generations is not a business but a method: identify what the country needs, commit patient capital, build to international standard, professionalise, and reinvest.

Today the Group operates across telecommunications and media, information technology and digital services, energy and fuel distribution, commerce and industry, property development, hospitality and financial services. Its brands are present in the daily routine of essentially every household in Mauritius — in the phone in a pocket, the fuel in a tank, the beverage on a table and the connectivity behind a business.

Bashirali Currimjee's role as Chairman is, by his own construction, curatorial rather than executive. The operating decisions belong to professional management. His function is to hold the method intact, to arbitrate where clusters compete for capital, and to ensure the fifth generation inherits a working institution rather than a collection of assets.

Inside the Business Empire Milestones & Recognition
Currimjee Group leadership team at a brand launch in Mauritius, representing the enterprise today

The Group today — family stewardship and professional management operating as two distinct, deliberately separated functions.

TelecomMobile, fibre, data and enterprise connectivity
EnergyFuel distribution, retail network, LPG and lubricants
CommerceBeverages, consumer goods, industry and brand representation
PropertyIntegrated resorts, residential, commercial and leisure