THE humble roots and inauspicious beginnings of Sir Anwar Pervez and Lord Zameer Choudrey make their story and that of the spectacularly successful company they built from scratch as inspiring as it is compelling.
As Britain’s richest Pakistanis and most supportive of good causes, Sir Anwar, a former bus conductor and Lord Choudrey, who had not visited a city before leaving his Pakistani village for England, have long enjoyed the legend tag in the pantheon of British Asian business figures.
The tale of how more than 50 years ago these poor immigrants opened corner shops in London, then launched a cash and carry empire called Bestway that turned into an international conglomerate will be familiar to many. What makes its repeat so appealing is that there are always fresh instalments to hook in the reader.
It’s a long-running family business saga that just never seems to run out of steam.
In January 2020, for example, Zameer Choudrey, Sir Anwar’s nephew who has been involved in the business from its inception and is still the company’s chief executive, hit yet another personal milestone when he made his maiden speech in the House of Lords – fittingly during a debate on social mobility. Baron Choudrey of Barnet, as he is now formally known, spoke again in the upper chamber just weeks later – this time calling for financial protections for small businesses in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic. Wearing yet another of his non-Bestway hats in November 2020, Lord Choudrey, who is chairman of the Conservative Friends of Pakistan group, found the time to organise a seminar to commemorate on Remembrance Day the role of the one million soldiers from the area constituting Pakistan who contributed to the Allied war efforts in World War 1 and World War 2 At the start of the pandemic, Lord Choudrey had pledged millions of pounds worth of financial and material support from Bestway to that country to fight coronavirus.
He says: “Let me reassure the people of Pakistan on behalf of our chairman Sir Anwar Pervez that we are conscious of our responsibility as the largest overseas Pakistani investor. Inshallah will not let our country down in its hour of need.
“The group has been working in partnership with the country’s leading healthcare providers and has donated ventilators and vital medical supplies to hospitals across the country. The group is also working actively within its local communities across the country and providing thousands of much-needed food packages and financial assistance to deserving families.”
At his side Sir Anwar’s son Dawood, who took over as the managing director in November 2018, has been spearheading Bestway’s UK response to the Covid crisis. Eton-educated and not too easily fazed, Pervez has had to admit that navigating the company through the biggest supply challenge the wholesale sector has faced in years has been daunting.
At the start of the pandemic in March 2020, customer demand for food and basic necessities was so high that even without global supply disruptions from producers and extra issues around health and safety in depots, the company would have faced a massive task to cope.
Fortunately, during his first year as managing director, Pervez had significantly increased Bestway’s capacity to deliver door-to-door to its customers, which meant it could increase its delivery ability while also meeting the extra volume going through its cash and carry depots – which had to be adapted to be Covid safe.
Aside from successfully overcoming these challenges, Pervez also played a key role as an industry voice in representing the needs of in-‘We will not let Pakistan down in its hour of need’Champions of small business Lord Choudrey has sought financial protection for independent retailers dependent retailers and wholesalers to the government during the supply chain emergency.
With producers under immense pressure to satisfy the needs of their biggest customers – the major supermarkets – Pervez worked through the Federation of Wholesale Distributors to put maximum pressure on the Department of Environment Food and Rural affairs to ensure wholesalers were getting sufficient stock to funnel to independents, a move that eventually led to major supply chain improvements.
“I know this was massively appreciated by retailers,” says Pervez.
“Suppliers when they come under pressure will yield to their biggest customers, hence our call for a fair distribution for all.”
As a national champion of the independent grocery sector, Pervez cuts an increasingly commanding figure, ready and able to take an industry-wide lead on major issues that affect not just Bestway customers but the independent sector as a whole – an obvious role for a Bestway boss who now commands the largest chain of independent cash and carries in the UK following Tesco’s takeover of Booker in March 2018.
He says he has learned a great deal during the pandemic about how governments source information and make new policy – and what he has learned suggests he wants to continue to play the role of an influencer.
“It does engage with businesses in order to base its decisions, but only the largest businesses have well-resourced corporate and legal affairs teams, and they can influence policy to a significant degree. More fragmented sectors don’t have a voice”.
One of his first acts at the start of the pandemic when there were food shortages due to stockpiling was to warn independent retailers against raising prices. This followed adverse reports in the press and on social media that some small shops were taking advantage of the crisis to profiteer. Pervez warned that this would do irreparable harm to the reputation of the sector and threatened to strip the right of any Bestway retailer caught profiteering to trade under the company’s Best-one fascia.
Despite all this, Pervez is hugely optimistic about the future for small shops which he believes were presented with an “unbelievable opportunity” to prove their worth to the public and “reconnect” with customers during the pandemic “They have worked their socks off to support their local communities in their time of need and have been able to showcase their services to people who would not normally visit them. They have been real heroes.”
The Bestway story goes back to the 1950s when Sir Anwar Pervez emigrated to Britain from Guja Khan in Pakistan. After working as a bus conductor in Bradford, he moved down to London in the next decade and opened a small shop in Earls Court. With his nephew Zameer Choudrey helping out in his spare time when he wasn’t working on his university studies, a further nine stores were launched.
They opened the first Bestway cash and carry outlet in 1976 – offering far better margins than existing wholesalers as part of a personal mission to stop small shops from being put out of business by the giant superstores that were springing up across the country. “Shopkeepers were having a big problem paying 10 per cent to the wholesalers, so I started by charging them only three and a half per cent. People said ‘you are selling too cheap and you will go bust.’ But I wanted to help the local community and the small shopkeepers,” he says.
This business model, which had seemed to rivals like guaranteed commercial suicide, proved so successful that today Bestway supplies over 125,000 retailers through 62 depots.
It also runs a 1,000-strong symbol group called Best One, owns the Well chain of over 700 pharmacies and has become a major player in the off licence sector after taking over the collapsed Conviviality drinks retail group.
As Bestway has expanded its UK operations, it has grown to become a multinational conglomerate with investments across the wholesale, banking, cement, financial services, real estate and healthcare sectors.
Bestway Group is now the 17th largest privately owned company in the UK, the seventh largest family owned enterprise and the largest Asian family owned business in the United Kingdom.
The various strands of the international group comprise the UK’s largest independent wholesaler, Bestway Wholesale; Pakistan’s largest cement manufacturer, Bestway Cement; Pakistan’s second largest private bank, United Bank; and the UK’s third largest retail pharmacy, Well Pharmacy. The company employs more than 33,600 individuals around the world and serves over six million customers in independent retail, real estate, healthcare, cement manufacturing and financial services sectors across Europe, North America, East Africa, Middle East and South Asia.
The commercial success of the group has been a springboard for a great deal of charity work. Sir Anwar says that at the heart of the group’s philosophy is the desire to help “those less fortunate than others” by supporting charities in the United Kingdom and Pakistan. “It is my article of faith that Bestway Group companies and charitable trusts embody the highest standards of corporate social responsibility by supporting local communities and stakeholders that have contributed towards the success of the businesses,” he says.
The emphasis on giving back to the community is part and parcel of the company’s corporate strategy. “By focusing on the key sectors of education and health, both independently as well as in partnership with specialist organisations, the Board believes that it can empower disadvantaged sections of the local community through economic regeneration and employment creation,” adds Sir Anwar.
In 1987, he set up the Bestway Foundation UK to channel money into charitable causes and every year approximately 2.5 per cent of Bestway’s post tax profits go to the foundation.
Bestway has donated more than £13.5 million to charitable activities in the UK and to further enhance the grant giving mechanism, a sister organisation, Bestway Foundation Pakistan, was created in 1997 with Zameer Choudrey as its chairman.
Bestway Cement and United Bank have donated over £6.5 million to charitable causes in Pakistan, either directly or through the Bestway Foundation Pakistan, including scholarships for more than 750 students of south Asian origin to attend universities in the UK, USA, Canada and Pakistan, and the training of thousands of apprentices.
Bestway Cement has also established health units in Thathi and Chakwal in Punjab, and in Hattar and Farooquia in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provinces of Pakistan. Every year these facilities provide free treatment to more than 20,000 patients. Bestway Foundation Pakistan has also adopted 29 village schools under a management programme to provide free education to over 4,000 children.
