Skip to content
Search AI Powered

Latest Stories

Sir Anwar Pervez, Lord Zameer Choudrey, Dawood Pervez

Sir Anwar Pervez, Lord Zameer Choudrey, Dawood Pervez

BESTWAY has come a long way from its origins as a small chain of corner shops in the 1960s, and on the other hand it literally hasn’t come a long way at all – the original cash and carry depot was opened 45 years ago in Acton, slightly to the west of where they are based today, at Park Royal, London.

Of course Bestway Group is now an international organisation, with huge interests in Pakistan for example, where its banking and cement industries help to maintain that country’s balance of payments account. In addition to banking and cement and of course wholesale, Bestway is now in petcare, pharmacies, retail, property and all manner of other enterprises, and has a multi-billion pound annual turnover.


Sir Anwar Pervez, a former bus conductor and Lord Zameer Choudrey, who hadn’t 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 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.

Fittingly, they won the coveted top award – Asian Business of the Year – at the annual Asian Business Awards, hosted by the Asian Media Group, which publishes the GG2 Power List, in November 2021.

A well-deserved recognition for the group’s response during the Covid-19 pandemic, adapting with agility and speed in the face of many a supply constraint.

Bestway Wholesale serves more than 130,000 retailers and 3,000 franchisees across the country through its 59 depots, delivery network and e-commerce channels, and they have been vocal in supporting community retailers. In the early days of the pandemic, when panic buying emptied the store shelves of essential items, Bestway spoke about suppliers “unfairly giving priority to the supermarkets” and called on them to work with wholesalers and retailers to ensure fair distribution of stock to all.

This type of intervention is quite natural for Bestway, for this is a company that was set up to help and even rescue Britain’s small, independent shopkeepers. And it is this context that makes the story of Sir Anwar and Lord Choudrey, and that of the spectacularly successful company they built from scratch, as inspiring as it is compelling.

As the pandemic began spreading globally, Lord Choudrey, Sir Anwar’s nephew who has been involved in the business from its inception and is still the company’s chief executive, had pledged millions of pounds worth of financial and material support from Bestway to Pakistan to fight coronavirus.

He said: “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.”

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 independent 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,” Pervez later said. “Suppliers when they come under pressure will yield to their biggest customers, hence our call for a fair distribution for all.”

Pervez is particularly proud of the good that Bestway has accomplished – and is increasingly adding to – via major charitable foundations in the UK and in Pakistan. But he is also very keen to stress the role that Bestway played in the history of “his” people, the shopkeepers, who migrated here and then prospered with Bestway’s help. And it was essential help, as he recently explained in an interview to Asian Trader. “The point is,” he said, “if Bestway hadn’t done what they did, we wouldn’t see the diversity of culture that remains to this day across the entrepreneurial convenience store sector. It was the start of a very big movement in the UK.”

It seems on the face of it a bold claim for a single enterprise to make, but it is essentially true. The late 1960s and early 1970s was a period of modernisation and change in UK grocery, with many of the small supermarket chains being gobbled up by the emerging giants we know today.

Wholesale margins at the time were high, 10-12 per cent, retail profits wafer-thin, and it seemed as if grocery stores could survive only by scaling up.

This made being an indie at the time a precarious and ill-starred career-choice, because the tiny margins indies could charge were on the knife-edge of being ruinous. Sir Anwar was acutely aware of this as a storeowner himself (of around 11 shops by the time he opened his first cash and carry) and had the insight that he could supply the sector he knew very well – ethnic-food stores in the first instance – a lot more cheaply than the existing wholesalers.

Sir Anwar’s ‘revolutionary’ act was to slash his wholesale margin to around three per cent, with the confidence that he could still make a profit by knowing his market and being super-efficient. “So when [Bestway] opened its doors in 1976, the pricing was fantastic, and it was a runaway success because lots of retailers could see the benefits of shopping there. Not only that, there was a retailer looking after them; someone who had experience running shops and knew what shopkeepers wanted, knew how they thought, providing them with a service to stock their shelves,” Pervez said.

Two compelling elements of the Bestway story are these: first, how did something so small grow into something so big? Second, how has Bestway managed to stay a family concern and resist the urge to cash out and allow a bigger, perhaps a public company, to take over at some point? “I think it was Sir Anwar’s desire to keep growing,” Pervez commented.

“The first depot in Acton would have been ‘success’ for a lot of people. But of course he wanted to keep pushing and keep going. He thought, ‘If I can do it well in Acton then I can do well in other locations.’

“So, the second depot came, then the third depot, and then Sir Anwar realised that the business was onto something that was replicable, repeatable, and could be scaled. Which is what he did. It grew at the rate of one or two depots a year and that turned into the norm!”

By the 1990s, they have started to look at diversification. The first major one was rice milling. They had never milled rice before, but it was tangentially aligned to the business. The next diversification was truly different, though: cement manufacture in Pakistan. They knew nothing of the cement business but the entrepreneurial spirit of Sir Anwar, together with the energy and drive of Lord Choudrey, brought to bear on the venture. Bestway Cement is now the largest cement manufacture in Pakistan.

Banking followed in Pakistan, enabling millions of people to be hooked up to the financial system for the first time, allowing credit for investment, security and prosperity. And through UBL Omni, Bestway was able to give the ability to local stores in Pakistan to operate for a bank for a few hours per day in rural locations providing banking services that people had never been able to access before.

It’s clear that Bestway is not afraid of diversifying into new lines of business as 2014 saw the company enter into the pharmacy business with the acquisition of Co-op Pharmacy, now branded Well Pharmacy.

In April 2018, under Pervez’s direction, Bestway swooped again, this time snapping up sinking Conviviality plc, including Conviviality Retail – Bargain Booze, Wine Rack and Central Convenience stores – all at the knock-down price of £7m.

Bestway also picked up the entire 180-vehicle ex-Palmer & Harvey van sales division including proprietary software, systems and essential staff that Pervez deemed essential to the ongoing growth of the delivery sector in Bestway’s wholesale market.

And, they have recently completed its integration of Costcutter Supermarkets Group - bought from Bibby Line Group in December 2002, a purchase that has placed Bestway at the forefront of independent UK retail as well as wholesale – to create a symbol, franchise, and company store retail estate incorporating more than 3,795 stores. The charitable works began off the back of Bestway’s success. In 1987 Bestway Foundation UK was established and a sister organisation in Pakistan a decade later.

“It is something that my father strongly believes in that is embedded in the heart of our business,” Pervez said. “It’s a fundamental tenet is that we should support those less fortunate than ourselves, and we should support the communities in which we operate. I suppose it comes from the concept of zakat in Islam, which is where you give a certain percentage of your income to charitable purposes.”

The foundation is primarily focused on education, but healthcare as well. To date, they have given in excess of $42 million to charitable purposes. It is a fine way for Sir Anwar to give back to the country he left in the 1950s to make a life here in the UK, which started humbly as a bus conductor in Bradford. His services to the business and philanthropy have been recognised by the UK government with an OBE in 1992, and knighthood in 1999. Next year, he was awarded Hilal-i-Pakistan (Crescent of Pakistan), the second-highest civil award by the Pakistani government.

More For You