Habib Jewels

That single act of bad timing, survived, is the spine of the Habib story. It explains both the conviction the company carried afterward and the contrarian instinct that had built it in the first place.

For an investor reading Habib as a business rather than a brand, the 1998 listing is the most informative single data point in sixty years of history. Most family companies are never stress-tested in public; their resilience is asserted, not observed. Habib’s was observed, under conditions no one would choose — and the company not only held but outperformed its own forecasts. That is a more reliable signal of operating quality than any figure a private house could put forward, precisely because it was extracted under duress and witnessed by a market with every incentive to punish weakness. Everything that followed — the deliberate return to private control, the patient diversification, the steady expansion into landmark locations — reads differently once you know the company earned its conviction the hard way.

A gold town and one shop that sold diamonds

Habib began in 1958 as Kedai Emas MA Habib Mohamed, a single shop at 111 Pitt Street in George Town — a restored century-old Jawi Peranakan shophouse on the lane the island knew as its jewellers’ corner, the Indian-Muslim quarter where gold changed hands. The trade around it was almost entirely Chinese-Malaysian and almost entirely gold: Poh Kong, Tomei, Wah Chan. Habib was something the street had not seen — an Indian-Muslim family house, one of the first Bumiputera-operated businesses in the country’s jewellery industry.

Its founder set it apart not by competing on the same ground but by refusing to. While the rest of the quarter sold gold by weight, Habib staked its identity on diamonds and gemstones, and on pieces the gold shops ignored — kerongsang clasps, baju Melayu buttons, floral brooches for an underserved Malay-Muslim clientele. It was a contrarian bet in a conservative trade: sell sparkle in a town that bought bullion. The logic ran against the grain of the market in two directions at once. Gold was the safe trade — fungible, weighable, resaleable at a known price, the form of jewellery a cautious post-war customer understood as savings worn on the body. Diamonds were illiquid, hard to value, and aimed at a clientele the established houses had not bothered to court. Habib chose the harder product and the underserved customer together, and in doing so built a position no gold chain could easily copy: not a better version of what everyone else sold, but a category of its own.

Through the 1970s the diamond business climbed sharply, and by the 1980s Habib was exporting diamond jewellery to the Middle East — a small Penang house reaching markets that its weigh-and-sell competitors never attempted. The instinct that looked eccentric in 1960 had become the house’s signature, and the basis of a claim Habib still rests on: that it is Malaysia’s largest home-grown jeweller. The qualifier is precise. On raw outlet count, Poh Kong leads — the Petaling Jaya chain passed its hundredth store in 2011. Habib’s distinction was never the most shopfronts; it was identity. It is the Indian-Muslim, Bumiputera-pioneer, diamond-led house in a sector long defined by Chinese-Malaysian gold dynasties — a difference of character, not scale, and a more durable one.

The name, and the reach

The brand most Malaysians recognise was not born in Penang but in Kuala Lumpur. In 1986 the founder’s only son, Meer Sadik, returned from university in the United States and opened the family’s first capital-city outlet at Semua House on Jalan Masjid India — the first store to carry the name “Habib Jewels” and the first with an open, grille-free gallery layout that let customers walk among the cases rather than peer through bars. The grille was not a small thing to remove. A jewellery shop’s metal screen was both a security habit and a posture toward the customer — it said look, but at a distance. Taking it down changed the register of the encounter from transaction to invitation, and it suited a house that had always sold the idea that jewellery was about people and occasions rather than weight and price. The Masjid India store also did something larger: it seeded a district. Other Indian-Muslim jewellers followed Habib into the quarter, and the lane became Kuala Lumpur’s gold street much as Pitt Street had been Penang’s.

Four years later, Habib became the first local jeweller to advertise on radio, television, billboards and buses — turning a Penang shop name into a national one and treating a heritage trade as a consumer brand to be built in the open, not a discreet family concern to be inherited quietly. Scale, brand, ambition: by the mid-1990s Habib had outgrown the single shop several times over. What it had not done was face a test of the company itself, as distinct from the trade. The crisis supplied one.

Listing into the storm

The decision to list came at the worst conceivable moment. The Asian Financial Crisis had begun in Thailand in mid-1997 and torn through the region’s currencies within months; by 7 January 1998 the ringgit had fallen from above 2.50 to a record 4.885 against the US dollar, and the KLSE composite index had lost more than half its value, sliding from above 1,200 to under 600. Markets seized. For a jewellery house the timing was doubly cruel: a currency collapse does not only freeze capital markets, it evaporates consumer demand for exactly the big-ticket gold and diamonds Habib sold, as households defer discretionary luxury and hoard cash. And the underwriters who had agreed to support the offering were beginning to pull out — the surest sign that the professionals expected the listing to fail.

A failed or aborted IPO at that point would have cost Habib capital and credibility in a single stroke. The company had committed publicly to becoming the country’s first listed jeweller; retreating would have branded it as the house that could not weather a storm, in a trade where the entire premium rests on permanence and trust.

Habib pushed ahead anyway. It completed the listing as Habib Corporation Berhad on the KLSE Second Board — and rather than missing the diminished expectations the crisis would have excused, it beat its published profit projections. That single fact did the work: it restored underwriter and investor confidence at the precise moment confidence was scarcest, and it converted a moment of maximum exposure into a demonstration of strength. Three years later, in 2001, the company graduated to the KLSE Main Board, the senior tier reserved for the country’s larger and more established companies. “We became listed during the worst possible time,” Meer Sadik would say of it. “But we beat our profit projections. That gave us the courage to keep going.”

The phrase matters more than it first appears. The crisis did not merely fail to sink Habib; it handed the company a kind of proof. A business that has performed under maximum stress has learned something a calmer entry never teaches — what it is actually made of, and how much weight its name can bear.

Buying its way back to private

The most revealing decision came when the danger had passed. In 2005, with the listing survived and the Main Board reached, Habib chose to leave the public markets entirely. It sold the listed vehicle in an RM1.3 billion transaction involving Chuan Hup Holdings and the Scomi Group — the shell ultimately renamed Scomi Marine — and returned the jewellery business to family hands.

For most companies a hard-won listing is the destination. For Habib it had been a stress-test, and once passed, it was no longer needed. Going private again let the family build on a horizon measured in generations rather than quarters — exactly the latitude the survived crisis had earned. It is difficult to imagine the same move justified by a company that had listed in calm waters; it was the proof of 1998 that licensed the freedom of 2005.

A house of brands, and a second shock

Private and patient, Habib spent the following two decades widening rather than deepening its exposure. In 2010 it became the first local jeweller to bring Italy’s Oro Italia 916 collection to Malaysia; from 2011 it added Pandora, then Ice-Watch, Les Georgettes, Hearts On Fire, Stephen Webster and TOUS — turning a single jewellery house into a multi-brand group. The diversification was structural, not opportunistic. Around the core of own-design gold and diamond jewellery, Habib assembled a portfolio that spread its risk across price points and occasions: international labels for the customer who wanted a recognised name, a gold-investment line of 999.9 bars, dinar and wafers produced through an LBMA Good Delivery refiner for the customer treating gold as a safe-haven asset rather than adornment, and an Islamic pawnbroking arm, Ar-Rahnu Express, that uniquely values gemstones alongside gold. The founder’s old observation — that gold never drops in price — had been built into a business model that earned from the metal whether customers were buying jewellery, banking bullion, or borrowing against it.

The model met its second real test in 2020, when Malaysia’s COVID lockdown shut every showroom at once and froze the foot traffic a jewellery business depends on. Habib leaned hard into e-commerce, and online sales reportedly tripled within a year of launch — a smaller crisis than 1998, met with the same instinct to press forward through it rather than wait it out. The pattern by now was unmistakable: confronted with a shock that closed its usual path to the customer, the house found another path rather than retreating to safety.

The sixty-year question

The founder, Datuk Haji Habib Mohamed Abdul Latif, died on 4 April 2018, aged 92 — in the company’s Diamond Jubilee year, sixty years after he opened a shop with RM3,800. Stewardship passed fully to Meer Sadik and Datin Sri Zarida Noordin. In 2022 the family opened the HARTA heritage museum, gallery and café in Ampang and broke ground on Masjid Habib in Penang; in 2023 it marked 65 years with a landmark store at The Exchange TRX, in Kuala Lumpur’s new financial district.

These moves are of a piece, and they say something about how the house intends to compete now that it is large. HARTA, holding more than 800 jewellery pieces some dating to the 1800s, turns six decades of trade into a heritage asset — a claim no younger competitor and no international label operating in Malaysia can match. Masjid Habib, built and fully funded by the group in the founder’s birthplace, its dome inspired by a diamond cut, ties the brand to community standing rather than retail footprint. And the TRX flagship plants the name in the country’s new financial district alongside the global luxury houses. Taken together they describe a strategy of building moats a balance sheet cannot show: heritage, standing, and landmark presence, in a category where trust is the product and longevity is the proof of it.

The open question now is the one every founder-built house eventually faces. The third generation has taken defined posts — Mirzan over Time Zone, Marissa at Forms Jewellery in Hong Kong, Mirsham at HARTA — and the second generation has framed succession as a matter of criteria rather than birthright: the business goes to whoever carries it best. Habib has already proven it can survive the worst the market can throw at it. Whether it can survive its own succession is the test it has not yet sat — and the one no listing can stand in for.

Last updated: June 15, 2026