Aberdeen Holdings was founded in March 1995 by the Kassim brothers as Expolanka Investments, a privately held vehicle for sectoral investment. The founding premise was that capital and people should grow in step, and that long-term value demands more than financial engineering.
From the outset, the ambition was that businesses born of a small island nation could compete anywhere in the world. The group that resulted grew through deliberate acquisition and integration rather than opportunistic accumulation, a distinction that becomes clearer when set against the conditions it navigated, including Sri Lanka’s post-conflict economic environment in the decade following its founding.
Today, under the leadership of Group Chairman Sattar Kassim, Aberdeen Holdings operates across 16 companies in five sectors: Packaging, Paper & Recycling, Cargo & Logistics, Energy, Healthcare & Wellness, and Global Food & Beverage, with a presence spanning more than 18 countries across Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and beyond.
With a workforce of over 1,800 professionals, the Group’s rapidly expanding international footprint is driven by a diverse team of more than 100 global experts contributing across its operations. Its activities, spanning supply chains, distribution networks, and community programmes, are estimated to touch over 1.2 million lives.
A Portfolio Built For Global Ambition
Aberdeen Holdings’ five-sector portfolio reflects more than diversification; it reflects a deliberate ambition to build Sri Lankan-origin businesses with relevance beyond local markets.
Across Packaging, Paper & Recycling, Cargo & Logistics, Energy, Healthcare & Wellness, and Global Food & Beverage, the Group has developed capabilities that connect production, movement, sustainability, wellness, and consumption across regional and international value chains.
In Packaging, Paper & Recycling, Expack Corrugated Cartons PLC, a publicly listed entity, brings manufacturing discipline, governance visibility, and sustainability-led production standards, while Neptune Recyclers extends the Group’s environmental footprint through global wastepaper exports and circular economy practices.
Together, they position Aberdeen within the growing global demand for responsible packaging and resource recovery.
Cargo & Logistics strengthens this international platform. FITS Cargo deepens this capability by operating as a global cargo carrier, providing transshipment services and access to multiple airline networks, helping customers move cargo efficiently across international markets.
FITS Express, as the sole authorised UPS service contractor in Sri Lanka, further extends the Group’s logistics reach by giving customers access to a global delivery network spanning more than 220 countries.
The Group’s Energy sector, led by HiEnergy Services, supports the transition towards cleaner and more efficient power solutions through Tier-1 solar and power distribution capabilities. Rather than overextending into capital-heavy infrastructure, Aberdeen has built a practical renewable energy capability that supports both internal resilience and wider market demand.
Healthcare & Wellness adds another international dimension through Bio Extracts, whose Baraka brand carries Sri Lankan indigenous wellness products to more than 50 countries. This gives Aberdeen a place in the global wellness economy, where natural, traceable, and heritage-based products continue to gain relevance.
Global Food & Beverage completes the portfolio’s international logic. Expo Commodities Global manages sourcing and export operations across Sri Lanka, India, Vietnam, Madagascar, and East Africa, supplying certified products to markets in Asia, Europe, North America, and the Middle East.
Ruhunu Farms strengthens the Group’s agricultural base, while the acquisitions of Stay Naturals and Tropikal Life International expand Aberdeen’s capabilities in processing, product development, and international distribution.
Expoteas Ceylon, through t-sips, and Damn Fine Coffee Roasters extend this reach into consumer-facing categories with higher-margin potential.
Taken together, these sectors do not sit as separate businesses under one holding company. They form a platform for global ambition: a portfolio built in Sri Lanka, strengthened by operational discipline, and increasingly positioned to compete across markets far beyond its home country.
Structure And Iintegration
The Group’s most significant internal development over the past decade has been the shift from parallel subsidiaries to an operationally integrated holding structure.
Under Group Chairman Sattar Kassim, Aberdeen’s subsidiaries have been linked at the operational level in ways that create tangible efficiencies rather than theoretical synergies.
“What the family founded was extraordinary; a culture of integrity, a long-term view, and the discipline to build businesses that matter. My role has been to institutionalise that, to take the entrepreneurial foundations and build frameworks around them that allow us to grow at scale without compromising what we stand for.”
— Sattar Kassim
Aberdeen’s growth has always been directed rather than opportunistic. The approach combines organic growth through market and product penetration with targeted acquisitions, always within sectors the Group already understands.
This coherence is reinforced by how the Group is structured day-to-day. Aberdeen’s operating entities run with their own management teams and exercise independent decision-making at both the strategic and operational levels.
What is centralized is narrower and deliberate. Corporate Finance, Corporate Treasury, Corporate Communications, and Corporate Secretarial & Compliance functions sit at the Group level, providing governance infrastructure that individual subsidiaries would find difficult to replicate.
The result is a holding structure that gives operating entities room to run while keeping the functions that benefit from centralisation at the Group level.
Interdependencies across the portfolio deepen this further. Cargo and logistics strengthen supply chain reliability for the Group’s export-oriented businesses. Packaging and recycling reinforce the sustainability framework behind the Group’s operating structure. The agri-commodities chain connects sourcing, processing, and global distribution across multiple continents.
This is the practical outcome of having built complementary capabilities within the same Group.
Governance And Leadership Transition
One of the less discussed but more consequential aspects of Aberdeen’s evolution is how it managed the transition from family-held to professionally governed. Many Sri Lankan family conglomerates have struggled with this: governance structures can remain nominal, boards can be populated for compliance rather than oversight, and succession planning can be deferred until it becomes a crisis.
Aberdeen’s approach has been to treat governance as a structural asset rather than a reporting obligation.
At the centre of its capital allocation process is the Investment Committee, a main board subcommittee composed of professional experts drawn from varied industries. Every investment the group considers passes through a rigorous evaluation process before reaching the committee, and the board has established minimum return thresholds that function as hard filters.
Decisions are made on conviction rather than intuition. This distinction matters more at scale since the cost of a poorly evaluated commitment compounds across the portfolio. That discipline, applied consistently across a 100% family-owned group, reflects a governance standard more commonly associated with listed companies.
Reinforcing board independence, institutionalizing these capital allocation frameworks, and appointing Sattar Kassim as Group Chairman with deliberate continuity has, by the available evidence, produced a group that is structurally more resilient than it was at founding.
The group’s diversification model reflects resilience rather than fragmentation:
“Diversification, done well, is not fragmentation. It is resilience.”
The operational integration work of the past several years is the mechanism that makes that argument credible.
Workforce And Retention
Among the indicators of organizational health, employee tenure is one of the most honest.
Aberdeen’s retention figures are notable: of its 1,800-strong workforce, more than 550 have served five years or longer, and approximately 30% have sustained commitment over an extended period. In a labour market where professional mobility, particularly in logistics and specialty agriculture, is high, those numbers reflect something beyond compensation.
To mark its thirtieth year, Aberdeen introduced the Decades of Dedication initiative, a structured recognition programme for long-serving employees operating on a tiered framework: Bronze (5-9 years), Silver (10-14), Gold (15-19), Platinum (20-24), Ruby (25-29), Emerald (30-34), and Diamond (35+).
The programme acknowledges what holding companies often overlook: that institutional knowledge, accumulated over decades, is itself a form of capital that cannot be replaced by recruitment alone.
For a group that has operated through the disruptions of the past thirty years, long-serving employees carry institutional knowledge of a particular kind: not just how the business works, but how it has responded when conditions turned difficult.
Navigating Disruption
Aberdeen’s thirty-year history is inseparable from Sri Lanka’s. The country endured a civil war, the 2004 Tsunami, the 2019 Easter attacks, the economic crisis of 2022, Cyclone Ditwah last year, and repeated bouts of civil unrest.
Each disruption tested businesses differently, and many did not survive intact. Aberdeen’s consistent response was to treat uncertainty not as a temporary condition to be waited out but as a structural feature of the environment it operates in. The calculated risk approach that defines its investment decisions was, in part, forged by that history.
The same logic has shaped how the group approaches regional expansion. Growth beyond Sri Lanka is not a new ambition, but it has been pursued with an awareness of the forces that complicate it.
Geopolitical tensions, particularly in the Gulf, have encouraged caution on expanding the commodities and bulk tea businesses in that region. Supply chain disruptions, including the Suez Canal crisis and instability in the Strait of Hormuz, have had direct consequences for Aberdeen’s export operations.
Currency volatility across the multiple markets in which the group operates represents a continuous risk management obligation, particularly given exposure to USD fluctuations.
The introduction of differential tariffs by the United States has required the group to revisit certain business models in specific markets.
Regulatory environments, both Sri Lanka’s outbound investment framework and the requirements of destination markets, further slow the pace at which international expansion can be executed responsibly.
None of these constraints has reversed Aberdeen’s international direction. They have, however, reinforced the group’s preference for building positions carefully rather than moving at a pace that outstrips its ability to manage what it has built.
Today, its resilience is more than posture. It is the product of three decades of calculated risk-taking through conditions that would have broken a less disciplined organization.
“Aberdeen Holdings’ five-sector portfolio reflects more than diversification; it reflects a deliberate ambition to build Sri Lankan-origin businesses with relevance beyond local markets.”
Beyond Business
Aberdeen’s broader commitments extend beyond commercial performance into areas the group considers obligations rather than initiatives.
On sustainability, Aberdeen Holdings is a certified carbon-neutral company. Through solar power, recycling, reforestation, and reduced emissions across the group, driven in particular through HiEnergy Services, Neptune Recyclers, and its logistics operations, the work of decarbonization has been made a shared responsibility across the organization.
The position carries particular significance for a small island nation that bears little historical responsibility for the climate crisis but is among its most exposed.
Aberdeen’s community work is formalized through the Snehadhana Foundation, which operates as the group’s commitment to nutrition, sustenance, and dignity for the people and communities its businesses are built among.
Through community kitchens, school nutrition programmes, and sustained support for vulnerable families, the Foundation serves more than 300 meals a day, every day, across Sri Lanka.
Its School Meal Support Project, implemented with Tropikal Life International, has delivered daily nutrition to schoolchildren, averaging 400 meals per school week for more than two years.
“We believe that how a business chooses to deploy its success says more about its character than any financial result,” says Sattar Kassim. “The Snehadhana Foundation is our commitment made visible; not a campaign, but a continuous obligation.”
The Next Phase
Thirty years in, Aberdeen Holdings has the structural prerequisites for growth at a larger scale: governance architecture, professional management, an integrated operating model, and a diversified portfolio with genuine cross-sectoral linkages.
The question is whether the group will translate that platform into regional expansion, and on what timeline.
The signals point to acceleration. The agri-commodities chain is already operating internationally across multiple continents. The acquisitions of Stay Naturals and Tropikal Life in 2024 and 2025 suggest an appetite for strategic expansion rather than consolidation.
That appetite is tempered, not diminished, by the conditions Aberdeen has learned to operate in. The group’s record of navigating disruption is not incidental to its regional ambitions; it is the foundation on which those ambitions rest.
A conglomerate that has absorbed civil conflict, natural disaster, economic collapse, and global supply chain shocks without retreating from its long-term direction has demonstrated that its governance frameworks and organisational discipline can hold the course under short-term pressures.
What distinguishes Aberdeen’s position at thirty from its position at ten or twenty is not simply scale but the depth of institutional infrastructure behind that scale.
The conglomerate of the Kassim family, founded as a private investment entity in 1995, has been rebuilt, progressively, into a structure capable of competing beyond Sri Lanka.
As the second generation of the Kassim family steps into leadership, they inherit not only a thirty-year enterprise but the institutional memory, discipline, and long-term orientation that built it.
Whether they accelerate the group beyond Sri Lanka at the pace its platform now permits is the defining question of the next decade.
Milestones (Fact-Box)
1995 Founded as Expolanka Investments by Kassim brothers, March 1995.
2011 Expack Corrugated Cartons consolidated into the group.
2012 Renamed Aberdeen Holdings, February 23. Governance restructure begins.
2014 Expo Commodities established; acquisition of eight companies including Expoteas, Bio Extracts, and Expoceylon Pharmaceuticals.
2015 Acquisition of Neptune Papers and Antler Foundry.
2016 FITS Express established as authorised UPS service contractor.
2017 Expo Commodities Global formed as a commodity export hub.
2018 Commodity operations restructured; entered poultry sector via Ruhunu Farms.
2019 Damn Fine Coffee commences specialty coffee operations.
2021 Expack Corrugated Cartons PLC listed on the Colombo Stock Exchange.
2022 FITS Cargo and FITS Trip Support were incorporated.
2023 Airpark established as a GSA aviation service provider.
2024 Acquisition of Stay Naturals. Snehadhana Foundation launched.
2025 Acquisition of Tropikal Life International, expanding the organic export portfolio.