There is a genre of business writing that treats corporate longevity as a virtue in itself. A company reaches a hundred years, publishes a commemorative volume, and the achievement is described in the language of endurance — as though survival were the product of character rather than of decisions that can be examined.
The Currimjee record resists that treatment, because the decisions are dated and the sequence is public. A trading business opened on Louis Pasteur Street in Port Louis in 1890. In 2024 the group listed 25% of its telecommunications operator on the Stock Exchange of Mauritius. Between those two points sit roughly forty documented entries, exits, partnerships and restructurings. Read as a data set rather than as a narrative, the sequence supports four propositions that are more useful than any amount of admiration.
One: the enterprise changed almost everything except its ownership
Nothing the firm sold in 1890 — livestock feed, rice, oil, pulses — is a material line of business today. Nothing it sells today existed as a category when it was founded. The sugar estate acquired in 1931 is gone. The Madagascar cement investment of 1936 is gone. The Rangoon and Bhavnagar offices are gone. The knitwear operation of the 1970s is gone. The Seychelles hotel bought in 2003 was sold in 2016. Majority control of the pay-television venture launched in 1999 was released in August 2025.
This matters because the popular account of family firms holds precisely the opposite: that they are conservative, attached to legacy assets, and slow to exit. The record here shows a firm that exited constantly. What it did not exit was the country, the ownership structure, or the practice of holding several unrelated businesses at once.
The pattern beneath the churn
Look at the entry dates against Mauritian economic policy and a rule appears. 1955: Pepsi-Cola bottling, as the colony began to consider industrialisation. The 1960s: soap, margarine and detergents, precisely as the state adopted import substitution to address unemployment running near 20%. The 1970s: knitwear, as the Export Processing Zone opened. 1970–72: tourism, as the sector became national policy. 1983–87: insurance and energy distribution, as services deepened. 1989: mobile telephony, at the moment of telecommunications liberalisation.
The firm did not predict these openings. It entered them as they occurred, generally early, generally with a partner, and generally at a scale it could afford to lose. That is a repeatable method rather than a run of good fortune.
Two: the largest returns came from options that looked small
The 1989 decision to launch EMTEL with Millicom-Comvik is the clearest case. At the time it was a licence and a partnership in a technology that was expensive, unproven at scale, and aimed at a market of under a million people. Mobile telephony in 1989 was a business for large European and American carriers, not for a Mauritian family group whose principal assets were consumer goods factories and a hotel.
Thirty-five years later that decision produced the group’s flagship: a network with 5G reaching 60% of the island’s localities by July 2023, a mobile banking service, a stake in the METISS submarine cable that connects Mauritius to Réunion, Madagascar and South Africa, and an equity story good enough to place a quarter of the company with public shareholders in July 2024.
The instructive point is not that the bet paid off. It is that at the moment of decision it was indistinguishable from the bets that did not — the Madagascar cement factory, the Rangoon office, the sugar estate, the knitwear business. A portfolio of long-dated options only works if you are willing to write off most of them, and the writing-off has to be as unsentimental as the buying.
The defining discipline of long-horizon allocation is not patience with winners. It is speed with losers.Editorial analysis
Three: continuity of ownership was used to buy time, not to avoid change
Family ownership has a specific economic function that is frequently misdescribed. It does not make a firm better at picking businesses. It makes a firm able to hold a position through a period in which a dispersed shareholder base would have forced an exit.
Consider the Le Chaland development. Land near La Cambuse beach was acquired in 2010. The Anantara Iko resort opened in 2019 — nine years later. Quay 11 opened the same year. La Place followed in 2021. In February 2026 the hotel reopened as Constance Le Chaland under a management partnership announced in December 2025. That is a sixteen-year arc from land acquisition to the current operating configuration, spanning a global pandemic that closed the country’s borders to tourism entirely.
No quarterly-reporting company with an activist on the register completes that arc. It is not that the family was more patient by temperament; it is that the ownership structure removed the mechanism by which impatience is normally enforced.
Four: the endgame of a successful family enterprise is to become less of one
The most revealing period in the whole record is the most recent. Between 2024 and 2026 the group listed a quarter of Emtel; appointed a Managing Director from outside the family while the chairmanship remained with Anil C. Currimjee; implemented a strategic governance reorganisation and a new group structure; released majority control of MC Vision; and handed hotel operations to Constance Hospitality.
Every one of those decisions reduces the discretion available to the owning family. Listing brings continuous disclosure and outside shareholders with legal rights. A non-family Managing Director means operating decisions are taken by someone who can be replaced on performance. Releasing control of MC Vision converts an operating position into a financial one. A hotel management partnership hands the guest experience — and the revenue that depends on it — to a specialist.
The group’s own summary of this is a transition from family-run operations to professional management, with structured succession and the fourth generation holding executive positions inside a formal structure. The word that does the work in that formulation is structure. A family enterprise that survives long enough eventually faces a choice between the family and the enterprise, and the way to have both is to make the enterprise independent of any particular family member’s judgement.
What this does not prove
Two cautions are worth stating plainly. First, this is a single case. One firm surviving 135 years tells us what was sufficient for that firm in that country; it cannot tell us what is necessary in general, and survivorship bias guarantees we are not reading about the Mauritian merchant houses of 1890 that made similar choices and did not last.
Second, the counterfactual is unavailable. We do not know what a differently owned enterprise would have achieved with the same opportunities. The 1989 telecommunications licence, in particular, was a scarce national asset; some of the return attributed to foresight is properly attributed to the scarcity.
What survives both cautions is the method: enter the sector the economy is opening, take a position you can afford to lose, exit without sentiment when the thesis fails, hold without pressure when it does not, and, once the enterprise is large enough to outlive its owners, deliberately reduce their ability to determine its fate.
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.