A miniature of Abans Group’s reach can be found inside Colombo City Centre, one that can be connected to nearly every shop counter. It is retail, hospitality and residential living stacked on top of one another, and it belongs to a company that began selling irons and record players from a corner shop in the 1960s.
The scale that journey has reached is not a matter of impression alone. In its most recent financial year, Abans Retail Holdings and its subsidiaries posted a revenue of Rs120 billion, a rise of 68% on the year before, as the group expanded its operations. Fitch Ratings Lanka upgraded the company’s credit rating to AA with a stable outlook that same year. These are the kind of numbers that belong to an established conglomerate, not a retailer that happens to have expanded.
Six decades of transformation have delivered that scale, including a move into automobiles, manufacturing, real estate, financial services and lifestyle fashion, and a growth of the original consumer durables business from a single shop to more than 450 outlets in the consumer electronics business and over 1,500 customer touchpoints across the group. The group now sits across two broad verticals, retail and real estate, held together by a shared services layer of finance, legal, IT, and secretarial functions that runs beneath every company within it.
Ask its leadership how a business gets from a single shop to that scale without losing itself, and the answer they universally offer traces back to the striving homemaker of the 1960s, the brand’s first customer, and to a simple belief: that giving people back their time was worth building a business around.
The logic that started it all
Rusi Pestonjee, Group Managing Director at Abans Group, is careful to credit the company’s founder before anything else. His mother, Aban Pestonjee, remains closely involved in the business even now as its Chairperson, and the principle she built it on has not moved. “Customer service and looking after the customer is the core to everything that has stayed constant right throughout our growth,” he says.
Tanaz Pestonjee, Director of Business Development at Abans Group and the founder’s granddaughter, elaborates on what that meant in practice. In the era the company was founded, domestic labour such as washing clothes or polishing floors was done entirely by hand, and it fell overwhelmingly to women. Her grandmother’s idea was to intervene in that specific problem: to bring in the products that could automate those chores and give people back their time. She sought to provide people a ‘better way to life’.
Aban Pestonjee herself has described that same origin in similar terms. In her statement in Abans PLC’s most recent annual report, she reaffirms the company’s path under the guiding philosophy of “One Legacy, One Vision, One Abans,” tracing its journey from “humble beginnings as a small corner store in Bambalapitiya” to becoming one of Sri Lanka’s most diversified and trusted business groups. She pointed, too, to a wider form of value creation beyond the balance sheet, noting that Abans PLC and its subsidiaries had contributed over Rs2.5 billion in taxes and distributed Rs3 billion in employee remuneration over the year, evidence, in her view, that the founding instinct to look after people had simply widened in scope over time, from the customer to the workforce and the state alike.
That distinction, between a business defined by its products and one defined by a problem it exists to solve, matters because it is the thread that makes sense of everything Abans has become since. A company that sells washing machines eventually runs out of washing machines to sell. A company that sells time back to a person can, in principle, keep finding new ways to do that indefinitely, so long as it stays anchored to that person.
Over the years, Abans has stayed anchored to the person, but the scope of the person’s life the company was willing to serve has changed. “Our vision has always been, from the founding years, to give people the products or tools that they need to empower their own lives,” Tanaz says. As the company grew, that vision widened outward from the homemaker to the rest of the household, and from the home itself into the other spaces where the same consumer spends their time. Rusi sums up the underlying philosophy plainly: the group tries to bring products and services that work with the same consumer, “whether one’s at home, at work or at play.”
“Abans runs an e-waste recovery scheme through its stores, offering customers points or trade-in value for dropping off old electronics, which are then processed for reuse and recycling by the group’s Cleantech subsidiary.”
From one shop to a conglomerate
The retail arm expanded first and most visibly. Starting out as a single consumer electronics shop, it grew outlet by outlet into a network of more than 450 stores, a footprint the group has continued to widen even in recent years through new distribution agreements, including its more recent appointment as national distributor for several international smartphone brands. By Rusi’s own account, it remains the backbone of the group, but it was not intended to also be the ceiling.
Automobiles came next, and rather earlier than most people assume. Abans has held the Hero distributorship since 2012 and the Hyundai distributorship since 2019, well before the recent surge of interest in vehicle imports made it newsworthy. “All the hype around purchasing vehicles came after the ban,” Rusi points out, noting that the group had been in the automobile industry for years beforehand.
Manufacturing followed a similar organic logic, moving the group from simply retailing consumer durables to producing them. Financial services rounded out the picture of a company willing to sit on both sides of a transaction, selling products and financing the means to buy them.
Then came lifestyle retail, and with it a widening of ambition. Tanaz frames the move into fashion and lifestyle brands like Boss, Under Armour, Skechers and Aldo as part of a broader positioning exercise for the country itself. She points to Singapore as the model: a small nation that built itself, from very little, into a regional hub for retail and travel. Sri Lanka, she believes, already has the raw ingredients Singapore lacked, landscapes, heritage and culture, but it has been missing the retail infrastructure and experience to convert that into a destination. “That was really our vision when we entered the fashion and lifestyle business,” she says, and it is the same thinking behind Colombo City Centre: to be more than a shopping mall. It had to give Sri Lankan consumers and visitors a more holistic experience than the country has previously offered.
It is worth noting how unusual that combination is. Few groups move from selling refrigerators to running international fashion franchises to developing mixed-use real estate without losing their brand’s identity. Abans has largely avoided that fate, and the leadership credits it to holding every addition against the same test: does this serve the same consumer, in a new part of their life, in a way that is more convenient than what came before?
Matthew Roche, Director of Marketing at Abans Group, does note that this appetite for expansion does not always pay off. “We’re not afraid to diversify, because we take calculated chances,” he says. “Sometimes they don’t always work out. But there is some kind of benefit or experience or thought that you can learn from experiencing something new.”
The machinery holding it together
The machinery holding it together is structural. Abans has built a shared services model across its retail and real estate businesses, bringing IT, digital, communications, finance, legal, secretarial functions and customer service under one system. That allows each new business to scale without having to rebuild its entire back office from scratch.
Technology has been part of that model for decades. From starting with pen and paper, Abans built its own software development team around two decades ago and developed an in-house supply chain system covering procurement, delivery and after-sales service. Today, digital transformation is being used to improve decision-making, connect data across business units and strengthen the overall customer experience.
But the group recognises that digital cannot simply replace physical retail in Sri Lanka. Customers still want to see and experience major appliances before making a purchase, while last-mile delivery remains a challenge outside the Western Province. For Abans, the opportunity is therefore not to choose between online and offline, but to make the two work together, with digital becoming a bridge that brings customers into a stronger physical retail experience.
The structural work extends beyond systems and into culture, and beyond culture into who sits at the top of the business. Rusi is candid that the group’s various companies, despite sitting under a shared holding structure, still tend to operate within themselves, each with its own CEO and senior management team pursuing its own version of success.
In response, the Group has embarked on a broader cultural transformation centred around the philosophy of One Abans. More than an internal communications initiative, it is a unifying mindset that is reshaping the way the organisation thinks, collaborates and grows. It is built on a simple but powerful belief: while we operate across many strategic business units, we are all part of one unified ecosystem with a shared purpose.
One Abans encourages our people to think beyond the boundaries of their individual businesses and embrace the collective strength of the Group. It is about breaking down traditional silos, fostering collaboration, sharing expertise, creating internal synergies and leveraging the breadth of capabilities that exist across the organisation. Today, One Abans has become a common language embraced by our Board, leadership teams, sales force and employees across the Group. It reinforces the understanding that while we may work in different businesses, we all belong to one Abans family.
Ultimately, One Abans is about creating a stronger, more connected organisation—one where ideas, talent and opportunities flow freely across businesses. It is helping us unlock greater value for our customers, strengthen our culture, and build an agile, future-ready organisation capable of sustaining long-term growth for generations to come.
Abans was founded by a woman at a time when Sri Lankan banks were reluctant to extend credit to a woman-led business at all, and Tanaz argues that legacy has shaped who the company promotes rather than remaining a founding story it simply tells about itself. Abans continues to have strong female representation across the hierarchy and roughly half the group’s board and C-suite are female.
Abans also runs internal female empowerment workshops for its staff. Tanaz notes that the purchasing decision for household appliances and consumer electronics in Sri Lanka is still most often made by women. A business built to serve these needs in the home is now, two generations later, substantially led by women at the top as well, and the group treats that as continuity rather than coincidence.
“Diversification of this scale creates an obvious problem: how a group would stop each new company from becoming its own island. Abans’ answer has been structural. A holding company sits above two sub-holding verticals, retail and real estate, and beneath every operating company in the group runs a shared services layer covering IT, digital, communications, finance, legal, secre tarial functions and customer service.”
Where the growth goes next
The group’s next stage of expansion is something Rusi often thinks about. In retail, the constraint is the size of the domestic market. “We are a small market, whatever way you look at it,” he says, which is why the group is exploring how to take its retail scale and operating model beyond Sri Lanka’s borders. In real estate, he sees a shortage of office space in the city centre and significant opportunity in Greater Colombo, where the group already holds land banks in prime locations and is looking at a mix of retail, condominium and housing developments to serve a rising middle class. In vehicles, he acknowledges the market is currently inflated, but expects the group’s range to keep expanding regardless.
Rusi states that in manufacturing, the ambition is to move up the value chain, from entry-level products towards more advanced ones, with research and development already under way and plans to expand local manufacturing to support import substitution.
Sustainability sits alongside these more conventional growth plans, and Tanaz treats it as inseparable from the group’s size rather than a side project. Abans runs an e-waste recovery scheme through its stores, offering customers points or trade-in value for dropping off old electronics, which are then processed for reuse and recycling by the group’s Cleantech subsidiary. Separately, the group has partnered with the Wildlife and Nature Protection Society on an urban wetlands initiative, protecting green spaces around the city that absorb carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. “Being a large conglomerate like us, we have this amazing opportunity to control the narrative and set the tone for sustainability for others as well,” Tanaz says.
Underneath all of it runs a belief that Sri Lanka’s geography is an underused asset. Rusi points to the redrawing of global supply lines over the past five years as a reason large investors are beginning to look for alternatives to their traditional bases, and he believes Sri Lanka’s position is well suited to benefit, provided the country can present itself as a stable place to commit capital.
“What the group is asking for is simply the conditions to match that ambition, and it is confident, given the country’s position and its own 58-year record of finding the next opportunity, that those conditions are within reach.”
A single request
Abans Group is confident in its future, and it is equally clear-eyed about what that future depends on.
“Keep your policies stable, come what may,” he tells policymakers. “As investors, when policy keeps changing with every change of government, we can’t invest too heavily into scaling. We have to keep our investments light. We have to stay nimble, because we can’t predict policy, and few policies have been stable and steady.” This has been true for as long as he can remember, roughly the past 20 years, and it is precisely this unpredictability, rather than any shortage of ambition or capital, that sidelines large-scale investment, he says.
Tanaz adds, “We’re not asking for some shiny, golden economy,” she says, “just some stability, so we can plan long term.” Rusi’s closing argument follows directly from that: stable policy would not only draw in foreign capital, it would also unlock investment from within the country itself, from businesses and individuals who would commit to long-term growth and job creation if they could reasonably track what the environment would look like in the coming years.
The story of Abans, told across consumer durables, vehicles, real estate, fashion and manufacturing, is not really a story about a company that ran out of ideas for where to expand. In her own reflections on the business, Aban Pestonjee has described the coordination required to hold such a wide portfolio together as resembling a well-orchestrated hive, each part distinct, but moving to the same purpose. That purpose endures to this day, and so does the appetite behind it. Abans Group has never been short of imagination, capital or the will to take a risk.
What the group is asking for is simply the conditions to match that ambition, and it is confident, given the country’s position and its own 58-year record of finding the next opportunity, that those conditions are within reach.