From a small Earl’s Court corner-shop to an Acton cash-and-carry; from there to nation-wide wholesaler; and now also a national retailer and pharmacist, as well as an international conglomerate that includes banking, property and cement manufacturing functions - the Bestway clan goes from strength to strength. And now there is, in addition to medals and knighthoods, the first Bestway ennoblement as Zameer Choudrey was made a lord in former prime minister Theresa May’s resignation honours list.
“It is an immense honour,” said Choudrey in September. “I am truly humbled to have been appointed to the House of Lords. I have always viewed the UK to be the land of opportunity and I look forward to contributing to the continued advancement of our great country.”
Billionaire Sir Anwar Pervez OBE, once an immigrant Bradford bus driver, founded his business in the 1960s, after spotting an opportunity to supply ethnic groceries to the growing south Asian community in west London (this was in the days before “world foods”, and when only tiny bottles of olive oil to treat earache could be found - at the chemist).
He was also acutely aware of supermarkets developing and selling more cheaply, and on thinner margins, than convenience stores could afford to do at the time – something that prompted his move into wholesale.
“When we started, I knew shopkeepers were having a big problem paying 10 per cent to the wholesalers,” he recalled. “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.”
It worked, and since then, the commercial and international rise of the dynasty’s profile has been parabolic.
The family hails from Pakistan, where it retains many interests and ceaselessly expands its businesses, chiefly in finance and construction. Bestway is now that country’s largest cement company and with 1,390 branches of Bestway’s United Bank Limited, its second-biggest private-sector finance institution (UBL’s new digital banking app is also one of the largest in Pakistan, with over half a million customers).
Bestway, through UBL, has also - almost single-handedly - brought banking facilities to ordinary and rural Pakistanis by arranging for its own banking “windows” at small local stores to open for several hours a day.
This is quite apart from the many philanthropic and charitable enterprises the group undertakes in its ancestral lands as a long-standing and routine element of its overall commercial practice.
In 1987 Sir Anwar first established Bestway Foundation UK, and each year the company contributes approximately 2.5 per cent of its post-tax profits to it every year. Over the years, Bestway has donated more than £13.5 million in the UK alone to fund its charitable activities. Recently, a cheque for £100,000 was presented to Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital.
A sister organisation, Bestway Foundation Pakistan, was set up in 1997 with Choudrey as chairman. So far Bestway Cement and UBL have donated more than $9 million (£6.9 million) to charitable causes in that country.
Sir Anwar’s son, Dawood Pervez, contributes personally in other ways – last year he cycled 358km in the gruelling Welsh Coast to Coast race to help raise £49,000 for GroceryAid, the charity that helps independent retailers who are unwell or down on their luck.
Although he has stepped back from the front line of the business in recent years, Sir Anwar remains chairman and is by no means retired – for example, he took then-Conservative Party chairman Brandon Lewis MP to meet Pakistan’s prime minister Imran Khan in Karachi earlier this year to discuss economic development and mutual prosperity.
Nonetheless, the changeover to the new Bestway generation, which had been underway for several years, is now more or less complete.
Sir Anwar’s nephew, CEO Zameer Choudrey – now Lord Choudrey – runs this truly international business, with Choudrey’s own sons, Haider and Umair, in charge of finance and export sales. Eton and Oxford-educated lawyer Dawood now runs the massive UK wholesale and commercial interests following the retirement of Bestway managing director Martin Race at the end of 2018.
The family have been on the side of the smaller retailer, even running their own Best-one Convenience franchise, and this focus remains a thick strand of the group’s DNA.
The Bestway Group is now officially not only the UK’s second largest independent wholesaler, but also its third-largest high-street drugstore chain, since the acquisition of 700 Co-op pharmacies five years ago, which were renamed Well Pharmacies.
Last year saw the collapse of drinks retail group Conviviality, which owned both the Wine Rack and Bargain Booze shops and two Convenience chains. This provided another 700 store-fronts acquired by Dawood and Choudrey, and increased Bestway’s position as a formidable retail player in the off-trade.
Bestway secured Conviviality out of bankruptcy for just £7.5 million, saving more than 2,000 jobs in the process, and Sir Anwar said it is expected to contribute an extra £500 million in annual revenue. It also picked up several warehouses from wholesaler AF Blakemore, which decided to end its foray into the cash-and-carry sector.
The group also snapped up recently-bust wholesaler Palmer & Harvey’s 180-strong lorry fleet for a bargain price around the same time, accelerating their ambitions as Dawood set about re-designing the wholesale operation, and pivoting it away from retailer cash-and-carry and into a future of fast, mass delivery to high-street and neighbourhood clients.
Choudrey recently admitted that on the high street and in general, “The market is bad and everybody is under pressure, including us. It’s the environment itself - austerity, funding cuts, uncertainty. The UK economy is not doing that great.”
Yet Sir Anwar remained optimistic, reporting in March that. “It has been an exciting year at Bestway Group, and we have been able to capitalise on market opportunities.” He concluded that, “we believe our fundamental strengths and our business model make us resilient and able to perform well even in testing market conditions.”
It was a sentiment echoed and elaborated in June by Choudrey, not long after the Brexit extension period had been sought and granted by May. It is always a pleasure to listen as Choudrey delivers his speech during the annual Bestway lunch on Royal Ascot’s traditionally sunny Charity Day, and this year was no exception.
Foremost in everybody’s mind was precisely the performance of the group under conditions of increasing economic uncertainty, and what might be predicted for the future, when so many were expecting dire consequences for the UK when it eventually leaves the EU.
(John Nuttall, CEO of Bestway’s Well pharmacies, recently admitted they had stockpiled £7 million of medicines, contrary to government advice, to forestall any import chaos.)
Choudrey, with his customary twinkly humour, trod lightly around the subject: “Over the 12 months since we were last here,” he said, “I have been closely following one topic which has been affecting the entire nation above all others. That is … Love Island … Oh sorry, I meant Brexit.”
His attitude reflected the fact that for Bestway business was, as usual, most satisfactory with revenue of £3.2 billion, well up on the previous year, and pre-tax profits £296m.
“Let’s just hope,” he concluded, “that Brexit doesn’t end up like Geri Halliwell when she overestimated her viability as a solo artist and left the Spice Girls.”
