Firoz Merchant

At the age of 22, Merchant, who grew up in poverty in Mumbai and was even forced to drop out of school as a result of it, visited Dubai for his honeymoon. He spent a significant amount of time during that visit scouring the lanes and by-lanes of Dubai’s Gold Souq. He subsequently set up a gold trading business in Dubai’s Deira district in 1989 and scaled it into a business that today employs over 3,500 people, with manufacturing facilities in China and India, and which also has plans to expand its retail store footprint to 250 stores in the near-term. With annual revenues of around Dhs1bn, between 70 to 80 per cent of the company’s business comes not from gold, but diamonds.

In 2019, Merchant was also granted permanent residency in the UAE.