PHP Family, founded in 1969 by Sufi Mohammed Mizanur Rahman, is a Chittagong-based conglomerate spanning steel, float glass, ship recycling, automobiles, textiles, power and more. This profile covers its history, businesses, dated scale, finances, environmental case and stalled steel project.
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PHP Family, formerly the PHP Group of Industries, is a privately held Bangladeshi conglomerate based in Chittagong. Its name comes from its motto — Peace, Happiness and Prosperity — and the group dates its founding to 1969, when its founder, Alhaj Sufi Mohammed Mizanur Rahman, began the ventures from which it grew. From its headquarters at PHP Centre in Khulshi, the family today runs more than 30 companies spanning steel and galvanised products, float glass, ship recycling, automobiles, textiles, power, agro-business and financial services, and it sponsors a private university in Dhaka.
PHP is less visible in public financial data than listed rivals such as KDS Group, because no PHP company is listed and the group publishes no consolidated accounts; its reported annual turnover was about Tk 4,000 crore in the mid-2010s and Tk 5,000 crore in 2020, and no later group figure has been published. The group is best known for three pioneering moves: Bangladesh’s first float glass production, the country’s first internationally certified green ship-recycling yard, and the first locally assembled Malaysian Proton cars. Set against those achievements are an ambitious US$4 billion steel plant at Mirsarai that remains unbuilt, and an environmental case over a dammed waterfall at Sitakunda. Remarkably, the founder — an Ekushey Padak recipient and practising Sufi — remains chairman in his eighties, with the second generation running operations and the third beginning to join.
Sufi Mohammed Mizanur Rahman was born on 12 March 1943 at Kanchan in Rupganj, Narayanganj, into a pious Muslim family; his father, after whom he would later name a hospital, was Sufi Mohammed Daemuddin. After passing his intermediate examinations he worked briefly for a private company before joining the National Bank of Pakistan — now Sonali Bank — in Chittagong in 1965, on a monthly salary of Tk 163. He later moved to the Eastern Mercantile Bank, now Pubali Bank, after graduating and earning a diploma in banking.
The group dates its origins to 1969. Profiles of the founder describe how, after Bangladesh’s independence, he left banking and began importing commodities in bulk with capital of just Tk 1,483; in 1972 he obtained financing of $4,000 and turned it into roughly three times that amount in profit. Ship-breaking and recycling, still a signature business, began in 1982. An edible-oil refinery followed in 1985, and in 1988 his plant at Madhabdi, near Narayanganj, began producing corrugated iron sheets — the seed of the group’s steel interests, which grew into cold-rolling and galvanising mills producing the flat steel products at the core of today’s group.
Diversification accelerated in the 2000s. The group sponsored the University of Information Technology and Sciences (UITS) in Dhaka in 2003, and in 2005 PHP Float Glass began commercial production — the first float glass made in Bangladesh. In 2015 the family announced its entry into car assembly, and in May 2017 the first locally assembled Proton cars were delivered to customers. In August 2018 the group signed a lease for 500 acres at the Mirsarai Economic Zone for an integrated steel plant that would have been its largest-ever project. In 2020 the state recognised the founder’s social work with the Ekushey Padak, the country’s second-highest civilian honour. More recently, the automobile business switched its Malaysian partner from Proton to Perodua in 2024, and the group began generating rooftop solar power for its own factories.
PHP Family is wholly family-owned and unlisted. Its founder, Sufi Mohammed Mizanur Rahman, has remained chairman throughout, and as of late 2026 — aged 83 — he was still appearing publicly in that role, presiding over group events in Chittagong in August and September 2026. His seven sons hold senior positions across the group. The vice-chairman is Mohammed Mohsin, who signed a healthcare cooperation agreement on the group’s behalf in September 2026, and the managing director is Iqbal Hossain, one of the founder’s sons. Individual businesses are led by family directors: Zahirul Islam Rinku is managing director of the ship-recycling company, and Mohammed Amir Hossain heads PHP Float Glass Industries.
Day-to-day control has passed to the second generation, and the family has said publicly that it intends the business to remain in family hands for generations. The third generation began entering the group in January 2025, when Nuved Mizan Iqbal, a grandson of the founder, joined after his studies — a succession path the group presents as deliberate and gradual rather than a handover.
The founder’s public identity is inseparable from his faith. A practising Sufi, widely known simply as Sufi Mizan, he chairs the Sufi Mizan Foundation and is known for a philosophy he summarised to The Daily Star in 2016: “In fact, the spirit of living is the spirit of giving. It is the purpose of human life.” That outlook has shaped both the group’s name — Peace, Happiness and Prosperity — and its pattern of religious and charitable endowments, discussed below.
The group’s industrial core is in and around Chittagong. Its steel companies — PHP Steels, PHP Ispat, PHP Cold Rolling Mills, PHP Continuous Galvanizing Mills and PHP NOF Continuous Galvanizing Mills — produce corrugated sheets, cold-rolled coil and galvanised products within Bangladesh’s wider steel industry. PHP Float Glass Industries, established in 2004 at Barabkunda in Sitakunda, makes clear float, reflective, tempered, decorative and soundproof glass. PHP Ship Breaking and Recycling Industries, at Sitakunda, has recycled ships since 1982 and operates the group’s best-known environmental asset, its green yard. PHP Automobiles — now trading as PHP Motors — assembles Malaysian-brand cars at Halishahar in Chittagong.
Beyond this core, the group includes textile mills (PHP Cotton Mills, PHP Spinning Mills and PHP Rotor Spinning Mills); power companies (PHP Power Generation Plant and PHP Power Company); PHP Petro Refinery; PHP Stocks and Securities; agro and food businesses (PHP Agro Products, PHP Fisheries, PHP Latex and Rubber Products and Dina Cold Storage); Pelican Properties; and trading and logistics arms including PHP Corporation, PHP Overseas and BAY Terminal and Distribution Company. In education, the group sponsors UITS, founded in 2003 as Bangladesh’s first IT-based private university, whose board of trustees the founder chairs.
The group counts more than 30 companies; The Daily Star recorded 34 businesses in 2016. Employment was put at about 11,000 by the chairman in 2013 and at around 10,000 in 2021, when the group’s monthly salary bill was reported at about Tk 11 crore.
Individual operations give a clearer sense of scale than group totals. PHP Float Glass began at 150 tonnes per day in 2005 and doubled its capacity to 300 tonnes per day in 2019 after an investment of Tk 300 crore; it produced about 91,000 tonnes of glass in 2022. The ship-recycling yard could handle roughly 150,000 tonnes of scrap a year as of 2018. The car plant at Halishahar can assemble 1,200 vehicles a year on a single shift and employed about 265 workers in 2021. Most heavy industry is concentrated in Sitakunda and Mirsarai, north of Chittagong city, close to the port on which the group’s trading, ship-recycling and steel businesses depend.
Because PHP Family is privately held and none of its companies is listed, it publishes no audited group revenue, profit or asset figures, and none can responsibly be stated. What exists in the public record is a series of dated, reported indicators. The group’s annual turnover was reported at about Tk 4,000 crore in 2013 and again in 2016, and at Tk 5,000 crore in 2020; no more recent group turnover has been published by a reputable source.
Documented investments give a partial picture of its financial weight: about Tk 1,500 crore invested in the float glass plant established in 2004; Tk 300 crore to double glass capacity in 2019; a further Tk 500 crore announced in November 2023 for bending glass, fibreglass net and aluminium ladder production at Barabkunda; about Tk 400 crore in the car assembly plant; and Tk 35 crore to bring the ship-recycling yard up to green standards. The group’s largest commitment on paper — the roughly Tk 31,600 crore (about US$4 billion) Mirsarai steel plant agreed in 2018 — has not been matched by reported construction spending, and is treated under Challenges below.
The group’s most serious legal difficulty has been environmental. On 4 March 2022, the Department of Environment filed a case against PHP Float Glass Industries Limited, accusing it of blocking a waterfall by building dams and razing hills at Barabkunda in Sitakunda upazila in order to water the company’s mango orchard. The accused were the managing director of PHP Family, the manager of the mango-orchard project and the company’s head of human resources. A court summons ordered the dam removed within seven days; The Business Standard reported that fourteen days later the dam was still in place. No verdict or final outcome of the case has been reported in the reputable press as of late 2026. It was not the group’s first such encounter: a Department of Environment list reported in December 2019 had named PHP Float Glass among six companies found to have destroyed about 160,000 square feet of hills in Sitakunda and Mirsarai, for which fines were imposed.
The chairman has also faced legal exposure of a different kind. In May 2025, Sufi Mizanur Rahman was one of 201 people named as accused in an attempted-murder case over the injury of a madrasa student during the protests in Dhaka on 4 August 2024 that preceded the fall of the Sheikh Hasina government; the deposed prime minister was the prime accused, and the list ranged across politicians, journalists, actors and academics. The case was one of many broadly drawn cases filed after the July 2024 uprising, and no outcome concerning the chairman has been reported.
Commercially, the group’s grandest plan has stalled. The integrated steel plant at Mirsarai — 500 acres allotted in August 2018, a planned 3 million tonnes of basic steel a year and about 15,000 direct jobs — was delayed first by an incomplete land handover and then by the Covid-19 pandemic, as the group itself acknowledged in July 2020. No reputable report of construction beginning has appeared since, so the project that was meant to transform PHP into one of the country’s largest steelmakers remains, on the available evidence, unrealised. The group’s float glass business faces a difficult market: by early 2026 national float-glass capacity exceeded 1 million tonnes a year against demand of roughly 350,000 tonnes, and producers including PHP were reported to be under pressure from weak construction demand, falling prices and dumped imports. A trade challenge, by contrast, was resolved in the group’s favour: India’s anti-dumping investigation into Bangladeshi clear float glass, opened in 2021 against PHP and two other exporters, ended without any duty after India’s finance ministry declined in 2022 to act on the recommendation to impose one.
Giving is central to the founder’s stated philosophy, and the group’s social spending is long-standing. Its CSR expenditure stood at Tk 15 crore in 2015, and in 2016 it was recognised at the Standard Chartered–Financial Express CSR Awards. In 1996 the group founded the Alhaj Sufi Mohammed Dayemuddin Hospital at Kanchan, Rupganj — the founder’s birthplace — named after his father. In Chittagong, PHP jointly funded a 10-bed paediatric intensive care unit at Chittagong Medical College Hospital at a cost of around Tk 3 crore.
Education is the other main channel. UITS was set up as a non-profit university with an explicit mission of low-cost, values-based education, and the family’s charitable work through the Sufi Mizan Foundation supports religious education — in August 2026, for example, PHP backed a reception for 25 Bangladeshi students leaving to study at Al-Azhar University in Egypt. The ship-recycling business, while commercial, has also been presented by the group as a social contribution: its investment in Hong Kong Convention-compliant recycling, recognised by the government’s Green Factory Award in 2025 and by a Bangladesh Maritime Law Society award in 2026, made it a model for safer working conditions in a notoriously hazardous industry.
PHP Family’s near-term prospects rest on its established niches rather than on the mega-project that has stalled. In automobiles, the 2024 switch from Proton to Perodua gives PHP Motors four newer models to assemble at Halishahar, in a market where brand-new locally assembled cars compete against imported reconditioned vehicles. In glass, the group has moved into higher-value decorative and speciality products, but it must weather an industry-wide glut that left national capacity at roughly three times demand in 2026. In ship recycling, the entry into force of the Hong Kong Convention in June 2025 plays to the group’s strengths: with only seven Bangladeshi yards holding green certification as of September 2025, PHP’s decade-old investment in compliant recycling is a genuine competitive advantage.
The open questions are structural. The Mirsarai steel plant would require both land handover and financing on a scale the group has not yet demonstrated, and its future is uncertain. Succession is being managed gradually — the founder remains chairman at 83, his sons run the businesses, and his grandsons have begun to join — but the group’s identity is unusually bound up with one man’s name and philosophy. Finally, the 2022 environmental case and the earlier hill-cutting fines show that the group’s expansion around Sitakunda carries regulatory and reputational risks that its green shipyard alone does not offset. PHP Family remains one of Chittagong’s defining business houses: a group built, by its founder’s account, from Tk 1,483 of trading capital into more than 30 companies, whose next decade will test whether the second and third generations can match that record while meeting stricter environmental and market discipline.
