WHEN Tolaram chief executive Sajen Aswani credits "the fortitude, the courage of our people" with seeing the diversified consumer goods, fintech and infrastructure group through this pandemic, here is what he means.

"We're in emerging markets. Our DNA is emerging markets." That's been the case for all 73 years this Singapore-headquartered enterprise has been in business. But with 16,000 employees - spread over 15 countries including South Africa, Nigeria, Egypt and Indonesia - an emerging markets focus has meant many of them have faced "incredible hardship on the ground" this past year.

Some of these developing markets have been roiled not only by disease, but social unrest and political upheaval too. Amid recent riots in South Africa, for instance, Tolaram's leader there found that he, his wife and his children had all come down with Covid-19. "Now as an expatriate, he had the option to get out and go but he didn't exercise it. He was more concerned with the welfare of the people, the welfare of the business," says Mr Aswani.

Without resilient, committed leaders like these, people who imbibe Tolaram's entrepreneurial outlook and possess an owner's mindset, Mr Aswani believes the company would not have weathered repeated bouts of existential crises, much less grown into the conglomerate it is today.

For 2020, Tolaram raked in US$1.2 billion in annual revenues, over 80 per cent of it from its consumer products business - which reaches consumers in more than 80 countries.

Rough and tumble of emerging markets

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Yet, from the point of its founding in 1948 when Mr Aswani's grandfather uprooted his family from colonial India to set up a textile shop in Indonesia, the company's story has by no means been one of smooth ascendance.

A next key milestone came in the mid-1970s, when Tolaram's current chairman Mohan Vaswani relocated the group's headquarters to Singapore, which was to be its launchpad for global growth.

The company was in many ways a forerunner of internationalisation. It had entered Nigeria in the 1980s and extended its global reach rapidly throughout the 1990s to other parts of Africa, the United States and Europe.

As it transformed from a regional company to a global one, a trading company to one that also did manufacturing, the family business began hiring professionals at very senior levels.

It is a point of pride to Mr Aswani that the company's leaders had the foresight to welcome talent into their family business early on, creating a cadre of loyal, capable leaders across all ranks - technical, marketing, commercial, business leaders - who have stayed the course with the company.

"Family members must have the right credentials to run a business. They have a right to the legacy, the inheritance. But positions? You have to earn the positions," he says.

"At Tolaram, the family side's core competence is in ideation, but we're not the greatest executors. You need people to be able to follow through, execute, put in the structures and systems, and the governance too."

The "right confluence" of people and circumstances has led Tolaram to become one of the largest packaged food companies in Africa, known for making Salim Group's Indomie instant noodles brand a household name across Nigeria.

Success in food manufacturing and distribution, with big-name tie-ups with Kellogg's, Arla and Indofood, has led to other blue-chip tie-ups in the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) space, such as Colgate-Palmolive and Kimberly-Clark.

With 23 factories in operation across Africa, Tolaram has invested US$500 million to date in building integrated manufacturing facilities there.

Then, there was its very first venture into infrastructure, which arose as a means of backward integration, to solve a significant bottleneck for its Nigerian business - port infrastructure for trade in and out of Nigeria.

Tolaram has now invested close to half a billion US dollars into the US$2.1 billion Lagos Free Zone project, which is Nigeria's first privately owned special economic zone and has a fully integrated deep seaport that is the country's single largest private infrastructure investment.

Mr Aswani does not expect Tolaram to venture into other infrastructure projects. This one had a very specific purpose - to support its Nigerian business and as a means of contributing to the Nigerian economy that has spurred its growth on.

But there were also rough times. Mr Aswani recalls at least two severe downturns in his own time with the company: Nigeria's foreign exchange crisis of the mid-1980s when the company could not recover a lot of its receivables, and the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s as liquidity dried up.

Those episodes have shaped the group's human resource response to the current pandemic too. "We've kept the factories going. They haven't always operated at full capacity all the time... but we've not lost a single employee."

This has been at the expense of short-term profitability, but Tolaram is taking the long view.

As the cost of production and materials in many of its markets ran up, Tolaram's businesses have had to take significant cuts to margins as prices could not be passed on to its emerging market consumers - themselves hit hard economically by the pandemic.

A fundamental priority for the company at the moment is talent retention, Mr Aswani says. While some employers might grapple with keeping motivation up as staff work from home, he is keenly aware that his challenge is to retain people who are working from distant, remote places, often far from family.

It takes little imagination to see how a global pandemic might prompt a reassessment of priorities for such employees - and Tolaram's response has been to ensure that it stays as flexible and empathetic to needs as possible.

Structured for sustainability

If Mr Aswani appears less concerned about how the pandemic has hit Tolaram's various businesses - and it has, from consumer goods in Africa to the packaging business in Europe and the fintech business in Indonesia - that might be thanks to a restructuring in 2015 that was undertaken precisely to enable Tolaram to ride out volatility.

That exercise restructured Tolaram into three key pillars: the business, the multi-family office, bespoke investment vehicle Maitri Asset Management and the philanthropic Ishk Tolaram Foundation, which is a 25 per cent beneficiary of the trust that owns the business.

"Our boom-and-bust history was what led us to set up the family office," says Mr Aswani.

Long before the term Vuca (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) was coined, Tolaram lived it - so closely entwined its fate has been with the ups and downs of emerging markets. Setting aside a reserve pool of funds that can be invested separately and drawn on in times of need was thus a risk mitigation strategy.

"Now, when we make investment decisions, we are a little less gun-shy. We know that if it doesn't work, there will not be an existential crisis," says Mr Aswani.

Beyond business sustainability, the group has also recently embarked on a coordinated groupwide effort to make more of its operations sustainable.

There have been significant efforts to move energy-intensive factories away from the use of fossil fuels to renewable energy, investing in biomass in Estonia and solar installations in Nigeria. But where these had been sporadic and led by the individual businesses, Tolaram is now staging a group-level push towards environmental and social responsibility.

"My children's generation have become very aware of the natural resources that we have and the damage that has been caused to the environment. They've grown up with a different consciousness than previous generations. They are the consumers of the future, and we have to recognise that they are far more demanding than we were," Mr Aswani told strategy+business recently. Two of his three daughters work for the Ishk Tolaram Foundation.

Deeper partnerships

What's next? Mr Aswani sees joint ventures as a likely model for growth. "We think partnerships are good. We bring the understanding of the demographic, the understanding of the terrain and the operational capabilities. We don't always have the science for the products."

Tolaram has just deepened its partnership with some of its existing partners, by venturing into new geographies in the Middle East and Asia with them.

The emerging, high-growth markets of South-east Asia still hold much potential for Tolaram and seem a good fit for its brand of emerging markets dynamism to flourish. "South-east Asia is definitely an area that we will look at now," says Mr Aswani.

In terms of business sectors, the manufacturing and distribution of consumer products will remain Tolaram's mainstay for now. But should its fintech business take off, Tolaram could well find itself transforming into a digital company, he says.

Since it first decided to buy Amar Bank in Indonesia in 2014, it has transformed it into Indonesia's first and only pure-play digital bank with a fast-growing microloans platform. Tolaram has now invested US$70 million in capital and holds US$300 million in assets in Amar.

That experience has seeded other investments - into a mobile lending platform in Brazil and an application for a banking license in Nigeria.

It's not just financial technology either. "We think that the digital space also offers many opportunities. So we may attempt digital businesses in some of the geographies we're in, that may not be fintech," he says.

"The Tolaram you see today is not the Tolaram that was here 60, 70 years ago. It has reinvented itself several times. And it's able to do that because it's adaptable, resilient and very entrepreneurial in its outlook," says Mr Aswani.

"And in 10 years from today, it might even look very different. We try to find focus areas, but it doesn't impede our growth ambitions."

Singapore's first and oldest law firm, Dentons Rodyk, is privileged to have served and supported Tolaram in its mission to establish enduring world-class businesses that transform challenges into opportunities. As part of the world's largest firm with more than 12,000 lawyers in 205 locations, Dentons Rodyk leverages its global reach and diversity to provide innovative and client-focused solutions to complex business issues. The firm has collaborated with Tolaram on various matters including advising on a partnership between Tolaram and a global food company to create a joint venture in West Africa and the broader African continent. Dentons Rodyk is also committed to working with Tolaram to ensure that its portfolio of trusted business brands remains market leaders in their respective spheres.