How to turn shop the size of shipping container into $1.8 bn multinational

During its seven decades, Tolaram has ventured into about 100 businesses

Mohan Vaswani’s father, who started selling textiles in 1948 from a shop the size of a shipping container in a small town in Indonesia, once told him “One day you will operate across the world.”

Eighty-year-old Vaswani now oversees Tolaram Group, a Singapore-headquartered company with an estimated value of $1.8 billion. Tolaram is building a port in Nigeria, producing paper in Estonia, running a bank in Indonesia and supplying power in India. It has food production and distribution operations across Africa and sells to more than 75 countries. Now, the company is expanding into digital services and plans to add