From a ledger on Louis Pasteur Street

A ship, a street, and the first ledger

Currimjee Jeewanjee left Mandvi in Gujarat and reached Port Louis in May 1884 aboard a vessel named the Nénuphar, after a journey of roughly two months. He was twenty-two. His brother Noorbhay followed within a year.

The Mauritius he arrived in was a sugar economy under British administration, its commerce organised around the crop, the mill and the port. Indentured migration from India had reshaped the island’s population over the preceding four decades; a smaller current of Gujarati trading families arrived alongside it, and it is from that current that the enterprise comes.

In 1890 he opened his own business on Louis Pasteur Street in Port Louis, beginning with livestock feed and widening into rice, oil and pulses. This is the date the group takes as its founding, and it is the correct one: 1884 is when a man arrived; 1890 is when a business began.

A company, a second country, and a succession

In 1900 the three Jeewanjee brothers — Currimjee, Noorbhay and Hoosenbhay — formally constituted Currimjee Jeewanjee & Co. The same entity, more than a century and a quarter later, is still the operating company at the centre of the group.

By 1907 the firm had opened an office in Bombay. The trade ran in both directions: imports from England, Australia and India; sugar exported outward. For a Mauritian merchant house at the turn of the twentieth century, an Indian office was not diversification but plumbing — it put the firm on both ends of its own supply chain.

The founder relocated to Bombay for health reasons and died in 1920; Noorbhay Jeewanjee died in 1926. Ahmed Ibrahim and Mulla Tayebali Amarbhay managed Mauritian operations through the interval. From 1926 the second generation — Jeewanjee and Abdulla Currimjee — took control, opening offices in Bhavnagar in 1928 and Rangoon in 1931.

Timber, sugar estates, cement — and a war

The second generation diversified out of pure trading. In 1931 the firm entered timber with Chantier Singapour and the Atelier Typ sawmill, and acquired the Virginia Sugar Estate — moving from trading the crop to owning production. In 1936 it invested in the Amboanio cement factory in Madagascar, described by the group as the only cement factory in existence there at the time.

In 1933 Abdulla Currimjee was the first passenger on the commercial flight between Mauritius and Réunion — a detail that is more than anecdote. In an island economy, being first onto a new connection is the whole of the commercial advantage.

The Second World War then scattered the family across regions and disrupted operations; the Adamjee brothers, Fazalbhay and Karimbhay Essajee Adamjee, who had joined in 1937, managed Mauritian operations through the period. Isolation was severe: shipping was constrained, imports uncertain, and the island effectively cut off for long stretches. That experience of supply-chain fragility is a recurring theme in how small island economies think about resilience to this day.

The industrial turn, and a country with 20% unemployment

1954 brought building materials through Batimex. Then, in 1955, the decisive move: Pepsi-Cola bottling, through what became Quality Beverages Ltd. The group treats this as the turning point in its own history, and it is — a trading house became a manufacturer. The third generation, Carrim and Hussain Currimjee, entered leadership in the same period.

The 1960s context matters enormously. Mauritius approached independence in 1968 with unemployment around 20% and an economy almost entirely dependent on sugar. The prevailing development orthodoxy — and the state’s explicit policy — was import substitution: manufacture domestically what the country was importing, to save foreign exchange and create jobs.

The group built directly into that policy. Soap and Allied Industries Ltd, Margarine Industries Ltd and Detergents Ltd produced National soap, Mil margarine and Blue Magic powder for the domestic market. These are unglamorous products. They are also exactly the products an import-substitution economy needs first, and they employed people at a moment when the country had very little else to offer.

Tourism, export processing, insurance and energy

The 1970s brought two changes at national level: the creation of the Export Processing Zone, which opened Mauritius to export-oriented light manufacturing, and the beginning of serious tourism development. The group entered both — Bonair Knitwear in the EPZ textile sector, and the tourism sector from 1970, with the Continental Hotel opening in Currimjee Arcades in 1972. The Cheribinny textile shop followed in 1976.

The generational transition of this period was difficult: Hussain Currimjee died in 1976, Abdulla Currimjee in 1977.

From the early 1980s the group moved into services and infrastructure: travel, with Silver Wings Travels in 1984; insurance, with Island General Assurance in 1983 and Island Life Assurance in 1985; energy distribution, through the Elf Antargaz partnership in 1987; and logistics, with Nakufreight in 1989. In 1988 governance was restructured for the first time, with Currimjee Ltd formed as group company secretary — the structural ancestor of today’s holding arrangement.

A mobile network before most of the world had one

In 1989 the group launched EMTEL in partnership with Millicom-Comvik. The group describes it as the first mobile telephone operator in the southern hemisphere. Whatever the precise ranking, the substantive point stands: a Mauritian family enterprise stood up a cellular network at a moment when mobile telephony was a frontier technology in developed markets and effectively absent from developing ones.

That decision has shaped everything since. It gave the group a licence, a customer base, an engineering culture and a balance sheet in the sector that would go on to define the island’s services economy. Vital launched in 1991. In 1992 a partnership with Bharti opened a route into the Indian market. In 1998 Telecom Seychelles launched in collaboration with Bharti and Raza Bilgrami. In 1999 pay-television arrived through the MC Vision joint venture with Canal+ and the MBC.

Within a decade the group had gone from consumer goods and hotels to holding telecommunications and broadcast positions in three countries.

Outward, then back — and the digital foundations

The group acquired the Méridien Barbarons in the Seychelles in 2003, later operating it as an Avani property, and sold it in 2016 to concentrate capital on Mauritian development. Between those two dates it built the service businesses that a modern group needs: Currimjee Informatics in 2005, the Multi Contact customer-relations joint venture in 2007, the Currimjee Foundation in 2009 to structure corporate social responsibility around education, health, environment and poverty alleviation, and Screenage in 2010 for hospitality technology — alongside the acquisition of land near La Cambuse beach for an integrated development.

2015 brought two things at once: Emtel’s launch of Airbox, a fibre-to-the-antenna technology, and a full group rebranding. Technical capability and corporate identity were being modernised in the same year, which is usually a sign of a deliberate repositioning rather than a drift.

Building places, and the bandwidth to serve them

The land holdings at Le Chaland became a destination. Anantara Iko Mauritius Resort & Villas — a five-star property with 164 rooms and eight villas — was inaugurated in 2019, alongside the Quay 11 commercial development. Le Nenuphar, a co-working space at Currimjee Arcades, had opened in 2018. La Place followed in 2021, together with Trampoline, a social impact accelerator.

The same year the METISS submarine cable entered service, connecting Mauritius, Réunion, Madagascar and South Africa. For an economy whose financial services, business process outsourcing and technology sectors all depend on international bandwidth, an additional independent cable route is national infrastructure.

Then the consumer layer: blink by Emtel for mobile banking transactions in 2022; 5G rollout in 2023, reaching 60% of the island’s localities by July; eight luxury villas commercialised; the “WE CARE. WE DO” communications platform; coral reef rehabilitation continuing in front of the Le Chaland property; and Quality Beverages acquiring Soap and Allied Industries.

Listing, restructuring and the shift to partnership

In July 2024 Emtel floated 25% of its shares on the Stock Exchange of Mauritius. A business the family had built from scratch in 1989 became, in part, a publicly held company subject to continuous disclosure and to the judgement of outside shareholders. In the same year the group implemented a strategic governance reorganisation and established a new structure; Currimjee Jeewanjee & Co Ltd acquired Quality Beverages Ltd; Compagnie Immobilière Limitée completed the Quay 11 acquisition; Emtel launched 5G in Rodrigues; and Anantara added the Tropical Aqua Pool and Ti Baz.

In August 2025 the group ceased to hold a majority stake in MC Vision, retaining 25%. In November 2025 it broke ground on the L’Avenir Distribution Centre. In December 2025 it announced a management partnership with Constance Hospitality for Le Chaland; the property opened as Constance Le Chaland in February 2026, the same month Quality Beverages inaugurated a new PET-3 production line.

The pattern across these two years is coherent. Where the group has scale and capability, it invests — distribution, bottling, network. Where a specialist partner operates better, it partners. Where control adds nothing, it releases control. And where a business is mature enough to stand public scrutiny, it lists.