The attrition rate of family enterprises is one of the more reliable findings in business research. Roughly three in ten survive into a second generation of ownership; the proportion reaching a third is smaller again, and the fourth generation is genuinely rare. The exact percentages vary by country and by study, but the direction never does.
What is less well understood is why. The intuitive explanations — later generations are less capable, less hungry, or less interested — are weak, because they would predict a smooth decline rather than the sharp cliff the data actually shows. Something structural is failing, and it fails at predictable points.
The three transitions where enterprises fail
Founder to second generation: the undocumented firm
A founder holds the enterprise in their head. Supplier relationships, credit terms, pricing judgement, which customer pays late and which never does — none of it is written down because none of it needs to be. The transition fails when that knowledge is not externalised before it is needed. The second generation inherits assets without the operating system that made them productive.
Second to third: the ownership fragmentation problem
Two children become five grandchildren become eleven great-grandchildren. Ownership fragments arithmetically while the business does not. Some holders work in the firm; most do not. Their interests diverge sharply: employed family members want reinvestment, non-employed holders want dividends, and nobody has a mechanism for resolving the conflict because the shareholder register is also a family.
Third to fourth: the identity problem
By the fourth generation the enterprise usually bears no resemblance to what was founded. The question becomes existential rather than operational: what is this family actually the custodian of? If the answer is a specific business, the answer is wrong, because that business will eventually end. If the answer is a capability — an allocation practice, a governance culture, a reputation — the enterprise can survive the death of any particular product line.
What the Currimjee record shows at each transition
The dated record allows each of these to be checked rather than assumed.
The first transition was managed under severe conditions. The founder relocated to Bombay for health reasons and died in 1920; his brother Noorbhay died in 1926. Through the interval, operations in Mauritius were managed by non-family managers — Ahmed Ibrahim and Mulla Tayebali Amarbhay. The second generation, Jeewanjee and Abdulla Currimjee, took control from 1926 and immediately expanded, opening Bhavnagar in 1928 and Rangoon in 1931.
The detail worth noticing is the non-family management during the interregnum. A firm that can be run by professionals while the family is absent is a firm whose operating knowledge has already been externalised. That is the first transition passed.
The second and third were managed through structure. Currimjee Ltd was formed in 1988 as group company secretary — the first formal separation of a governance function from the operating business. The 1955 entry into manufacturing coincided with the third generation, Carrim and Hussain Currimjee, entering leadership, and the difficult sequence of deaths in 1976 and 1977 did not interrupt the group’s expansion into travel, insurance and energy through the 1980s.
The fourth transition, in progress and unusually visible
What makes the current period analytically valuable is that the fourth transition is happening in public, on the record, within a compressed window.
Between 2024 and 2026: 25% of Emtel listed on the Stock Exchange of Mauritius in July 2024; a strategic governance reorganisation and a new group structure implemented; a Managing Director appointed from outside the family, with Anil C. Currimjee as Chairman of both Currimjee Limited and Currimjee Jeewanjee & Co Ltd; majority control of MC Vision released in August 2025; and hotel operations at Le Chaland handed to Constance Hospitality from February 2026. The group describes the result as a transition from family-run operations to professional management, with structured succession and the fourth generation holding executive positions within a formal structure.
Every item in that list reduces family discretion. That is not incidental to the transition — it is the mechanism of it.
The counter-intuitive finding is that family enterprises reach a fourth generation by making the family less powerful, not more. Control is what fails; structure is what persists.Editorial analysis
Why reducing discretion works
Four reasons, each observable in the record above.
It removes the single point of failure. An enterprise dependent on one individual’s judgement fails when that judgement fails, and every individual’s judgement eventually fails — through error, illness or age.
It creates an external valuation. A listed subsidiary has a published price. Succession, estate planning, dispute resolution and partial exits all become tractable problems once a number exists that nobody in the family produced.
It imports discipline the family cannot supply. Outside shareholders ask questions relatives will not. A regulator requires disclosure that internal processes would not. This is uncomfortable and that is the point.
It resolves the fragmentation problem. A listed vehicle offers non-employed holders liquidity, which removes the pressure to extract value from an operating business that needs to reinvest.
The role that emerges: steward rather than proprietor
What remains for the family after this transition is not operating control. It is something narrower and, arguably, more demanding.
The steward’s function is to hold the time horizon. Professional managers are appointed, evaluated and replaced on performance measured over a few years; that is what makes them effective and it is also what makes them structurally short-term. Outside shareholders trade in and out. The only party with a reason to weigh a decision on a twenty-year view is the party that expects to still be there in twenty years.
The second function is to hold the standard. Culture in a long-lived enterprise is not the wall posters; it is the accumulated memory of which behaviours were tolerated and which were not. That memory lives with people who have been present long enough to carry it, and it is the one asset a professional manager on a five-year mandate genuinely cannot supply.
The test that has not been run yet
None of this is proof. The current governance transition is recent, and its success will be measurable only when the structure has to survive something difficult without the people who designed it.
The honest assessment is that the Currimjee enterprise has passed three generational transitions on the documented record and is visibly attempting the fourth by the method that research suggests works — formalisation, professionalisation and the deliberate dilution of family control. Whether it holds is a question for a decade from now, and any claim to know the answer today would be a claim about a future that has not happened.
Sources referenced in this essay: Currimjee Group published corporate history (currimjee.com); Le Mauricien, 28 September 2023; Business Mauritius and L’Express, 1 October 2025; Business Magazine cover interview; Defi Media; World Bank; African Development Bank; International Monetary Fund; Mo Ibrahim Foundation, 2024 Ibrahim Index of African Governance. This essay is editorial analysis prepared for anilcurrimjee.com and is not a statement by Anil C. Currimjee except where a sourced quotation appears.