POTS OF DIGNITY

The Fernando family behind the global brand Dilmah have rejected conventional business wisdom to create something rarer than profit: lasting impact.

- Valerie Lim

When Dilhan Fernando took over from his father as chief executive of Dilmah Ceylon Tea Company in 2019, he inherited more than a business-he inherited a commercially heretical philosophy: that the goal of a company's making money is to give it away.

His father, Merrill Joseph Fernando, who founded the company in 1985 and died in 2023, built Dilmah on a principle that runs counter to decades of business school teaching. From the get-go, its values defied Milton Friedman's doctrine that a company's main goal is to increase profits and maximise returns to shareholder—one that dominated business thinking in the 1970s and 80s and that Fernando was familiar with from his studies at the London School of Economics.

“My father grew up in a little village [in Sri Lanka]—blink and you would miss it. Everything he learnt about business came from my grandmother. Although she never had very much growing up, her kindness was epitomised by the fact that anybody walking past would get little bit of food,” Fernando recalls.

That philosophy has transformed thousands of lives; the Dilmah workforce numbers 14,000, while MJF Charitable Foundation—Fernando Senior's namesake foundation—has benefitted more than 124,000 people from underprivileged backgrounds. In the 2024/25 financial year alone, the foundation distributed more than 1 billion Sri Lankan rupees (approximately US$3.3 million) to its conservation projects and development initiatives, which include schools for children with mental and physical disabilities.

In the two decades since its 2003 founding, the total has reached US$55 million. But what distinguishes the organisation's approach is its insistence on dignity over charity.