Walton Group, founded in 1977 by S. M. Nazrul Islam, is Bangladesh's largest electronics conglomerate, led by the listed Walton Hi-Tech Industries. This profile covers its history, businesses, audited finances, exports and the free-float controversy.
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Walton Group is Bangladesh’s largest electronics and electrical appliances conglomerate, and the company most closely associated with the country’s shift from importing consumer durables to manufacturing them. Founded in 1977 by S. M. Nazrul Islam as a small trading firm, Rezvi & Brothers, the group today centres on Walton Hi-Tech Industries PLC (WHIPLC), a listed manufacturer of refrigerators, freezers, air conditioners, televisions and compressors, alongside sister concerns in IT products, retail and other industries. Its Walton and Marcel brands dominate the domestic market: in 2023 Walton held about 75 per cent of the refrigerator market and roughly half of all television sales in Bangladesh, a position built on the growth of the wider electrical and electronics industry.
The group’s recent financial record shows both its scale and its exposure to Bangladesh’s economic cycles. WHIPLC’s revenue was Tk 7,393 crore in the year to June 2026, with net profit of Tk 1,125 crore — a recovery from a profit fall the year before, but still below its FY24 peak. The group remains wholly controlled by the founder’s family, and its stated ambition is to make Walton one of the world’s top five electronics brands by 2030, although exports still account for only a small part of its business.
Walton’s founder, Alhaj S. M. Nazrul Islam, was born on 7 May 1924 in Ghosai Joair village in Tangail. After working in his father’s business, he struck out on his own following Bangladesh’s independence and in 1977 established Rezvi & Brothers in Dhaka, naming the firm after his eldest son, S. M. Nurul Alam Rezvi. The business — also known as the R. B. Group — traded in electronics and initially imported televisions. The brand names Walton and Marcel were chosen in family discussions, and the group later adopted the Walton name itself.
For its first three decades the group was a trading and distribution business. The decisive turn came when the founder’s sons, led by Rezvi, pushed into manufacturing. Walton Hi-Tech Industries was incorporated as a private limited company on 17 April 2006, built a large plant at Chandra in Kaliakair, Gazipur, and began commercial production in 2008 — the first manufacture of refrigerators and freezers in Bangladesh. In 2017 it commissioned the country’s first refrigerator compressor plant, making Bangladesh one of only fifteen countries, and the second in SAARC, with such a facility. The company was converted into a public limited company in 2018.
S. M. Nazrul Islam died on 17 December 2017, aged 93, and control passed to his five sons. In September 2020 WHIPLC listed on the Dhaka and Chittagong stock exchanges, raising Tk 100 crore by selling just 0.97 per cent of its shares; the stock jumped the maximum 50 per cent on its debut and Walton briefly became one of the market’s largest companies by capitalisation. In April 2022 the company won an international tender to buy three European brands — ACC, Zanussi Elettromeccanica (ZEM) and Verdichter (VOE) — from Italia Wanbao-ACC, together with their trademarks in 57 countries and a compressor production line, lifting its compressor capacity to 4.8 million units a year.
Walton remains a family company. The founder’s five sons — S. M. Nurul Alam Rezvi, S. M. Shamsul Alam, S. M. Ashraful Alam, S. M. Mahbubul Alam and S. M. Rezaul Alam — are sponsor-directors of the listed company, and Rezvi, the eldest, became chairman of the group after his father’s death. According to Dhaka Stock Exchange data, sponsors and directors held 74.07 per cent of WHIPLC in October 2024, with the general public holding 25.32 per cent and institutional and foreign investors under 1 per cent combined — a structure whose unusually small public float has drawn regulatory attention (see Challenges and Controversies).
Day-to-day leadership of the listed company has been held by the brothers since October 2023. S. M. Shamsul Alam is chairman, S. M. Ashraful Alam vice-chairman and S. M. Mahbubul Alam managing director; all three are founding directors, took office on 14 October 2023, and remained in post through the company’s 20th annual general meeting in October 2026, which approved the managing director’s reappointment. The group’s one experiment with a professional chief executive from outside the family, engineer Golam Murshed, who served as managing director and CEO from October 2020, ended when his three-year term expired in October 2023 and he left to run his own furniture business. The group’s corporate office is in Dhaka’s Bashundhara Residential Area, while WHIPLC’s headquarters sit alongside its plant at Chandra, Gazipur.
The group’s core is WHIPLC, which manufactures refrigerators, freezers, air conditioners, televisions and compressors under the Walton and Marcel brands, and now also markets products under the European ACC, Zanussi Elettromeccanica and Verdichter brands it acquired in 2022. Around it sit more than ten privately held sister concerns. Walton Micro-Tech Corporation produces televisions, while other concerns operate in chemicals, media and agro-processing.
The largest sister concern is Walton Digi-Tech Industries, which began making smartphones at Chandra in October 2017 and has grown into the country’s principal manufacturer of mobile phones, laptops, computers, printed circuit boards and electric bikes — part of the broader rise of mobile phone manufacturing in Bangladesh. Digi-Tech reported revenue of Tk 1,016 crore and profit of Tk 18.14 crore in FY24. In September 2025 WHIPLC agreed to merge Digi-Tech into itself, arguing that folding laptops, phones and electric bikes into the listed company would expand its portfolio and cut costs; the securities regulator issued a no-objection certificate in March 2026 and the merger was proceeding through shareholder and court approvals during 2026.
Distribution is handled largely within the family empire. Walton Plaza, the group’s retail and service chain and a related party of the listed company, ran 645 outlets across Bangladesh in September 2023, supplemented by exclusive distributors, dealers and the E-Plaza online store — more than 25,000 points of sale in all. The group has also moved into new product areas, most recently a lithium-ion battery cell plant at Chandra, built at a cost of about Tk 113 crore with planned capacity of 10 million cells a year, where trial production was due to begin in late 2026.
Manufacturing is concentrated at WHIPLC’s plant at Chandra, Kaliakair, in Gazipur. The company describes a complex of about 9.6 million square feet of working space in 71 buildings and sheds, employing more than 23,000 people at the listed company alone. Its compressor plant, opened in 2017, and the production line acquired from Italy in 2022 give it capacity of 4.8 million compressors a year, supplying its own refrigerators and export customers. After-sales service runs through an ISO-certified network of 88 premises with more than 2,790 staff.
Walton’s market position at home is dominant — the leading share of refrigerator and television sales noted above, and the country’s number-one refrigerator brand award for the twelfth time in 2025. Exports, however, remain modest relative to that base. Walton products had reached about 40 countries by 2023, and in August 2026 the company’s vice-chairman put the brand’s footprint at 55 countries; yet refrigerator exports were only about 100,000 units in FY24, against domestic production capacity measured in millions, with a company target of 300,000 units by 2026.
The plant is also a significant energy user that has been investing in its own generation: WHIPLC’s solar capacity reached about 26 megawatts in FY26, with a target of 50 megawatts in FY27, and its mould and die complex holds LEED Platinum green-building certification.
WHIPLC’s audited results trace Bangladesh’s recent economic turbulence closely. In FY22 the company earned revenue of Tk 8,168 crore and net profit of Tk 1,216 crore. The following year brought the shock: as the Russia–Ukraine war drove up the dollar, raw-material and freight costs, revenue fell 19 per cent to Tk 6,637 crore in FY23 and net profit fell 36 per cent to Tk 783 crore — the lowest since listing — with foreign-exchange losses of Tk 469 crore and even a small loss in the September 2022 quarter.
Recovery followed in FY24, when revenue rose about 13 per cent to Tk 7,512 crore and net profit jumped 73 per cent to Tk 1,356 crore (earnings per share of Tk 44.78), helped by finance costs falling from 11.35 per cent of sales to 6.11 per cent. The board paid a 350 per cent cash dividend, its highest since listing. FY25 then reversed part of the gain: the political unrest of July–August 2024 and persistent inflation cut revenue by 5.72 per cent to Tk 7,082 crore and profit by 23.5 per cent to Tk 1,037 crore, with air-conditioner sales down 32 per cent and television sales down 21 per cent. The dividend was reduced to 175 per cent cash plus 10 per cent stock.
In FY26 the company returned to growth: revenue increased 4.4 per cent to Tk 7,393 crore and net profit rose 8.5 per cent to Tk 1,125 crore, as finance costs fell by nearly 60 per cent to Tk 181 crore. Earnings per share were Tk 33.75 on the enlarged capital, net asset value with revaluation stood at about Tk 12,704 crore, and shareholders approved a 180 per cent cash and 10 per cent stock dividend at the October 2026 annual general meeting — the cash portion being paid out the day after the meeting.
Walton’s earnings are unusually exposed to forces outside its control, as the swings above show. Its products are discretionary purchases: company officials have acknowledged that when inflation squeezes household budgets, customers simply keep their old refrigerators and televisions longer, and air-conditioner sales depend heavily on the weather — unit sales peaked at about 650,000 in the hot summer of 2024 and fell back the following year. Currency depreciation has repeatedly produced large foreign-exchange losses (Tk 469 crore in FY23; about Tk 124 crore in FY25), and tax policy matters too: in the March 2026 quarter, profit fell 28 per cent year-on-year, which the company attributed in part to higher value-added tax on key products.
The longest-running controversy concerns the company’s shareholding. Walton listed in 2020 having sold less than 1 per cent of its shares to the public, an arrangement criticised at the time for distorting the stock index — its weight in the DSEX reached 7.33 per cent in January 2021 — and by the prime minister’s private industry adviser, among others. In September 2021 the securities regulator ordered Walton to raise its free float to at least 10 per cent. After extensions, the company complied largely by a different route: from late 2023, sponsor-directors sold some shares but mainly gifted nearly 29.7 per cent of the company to non-director family members, lifting the measured free float above 30 per cent. Analysts quoted in the financial press described the compliance as technical: the gifted shares remain within the family, the change unlocked a corporate tax reduction, and roughly Tk 111 crore of the resulting higher dividends flows back to family shareholders. The episode underlines the governance question that hangs over the group — that effective control has never left the founding family.
Finally, the group’s global ambition sits uneasily with its export record. Walton speaks of becoming a top-five world electronics brand by 2030, yet after two decades of manufacturing its export volumes — about 100,000 refrigerators in FY24 — are a fraction of those of established regional rivals such as BEXIMCO’s export businesses in other sectors, and the great majority of revenue still comes from a single, price-sensitive domestic market.
Walton states that its corporate social responsibility focuses on sports, culture, technology and the environment, and in practice sport — above all cricket — dominates. The company has title-sponsored 13 consecutive editions of both the Dhaka Premier League and the National Cricket League, and ran the Central Zone franchise in the first-class Bangladesh Cricket League for nine consecutive years. In August 2026 the president of the Bangladesh Cricket Board visited Walton’s corporate office to ask for its continued support as domestic competitions are restructured into franchise leagues, a request the company publicly welcomed.
The family’s philanthropy predates the group’s fame: the founder established a technical school in his home village in Tangail and supported mosques, schools and orphanages. On the environmental side, the company received the government’s Green Factory Award in 2025 for the second time in the electrical and electronics category, and its sustainability reporting was recognised with the SDG Brand Champion Award 2025. Walton’s governance disclosures have also been decorated — the ICSB National Award for Corporate Governance Excellence for five consecutive years to 2025 and the ICMAB Best Corporate Award for four — even as the free-float episode shows the limits of that recognition.
Walton enters 2027 with several strategic moves in train. The merger of Digi-Tech into the listed company would consolidate phones, laptops and electric bikes inside WHIPLC; the new lithium battery plant extends it into components for the electric-vehicle supply chain; and solar capacity is set to double to 50 megawatts. Its European brands give it a platform — compressors, and potentially appliances — for the export growth it has long promised, and its finance costs, the biggest single drag on recent profits, have fallen sharply.
Against that stand the same vulnerabilities: a domestic market where demand swings with inflation, interest rates, tax changes and even the summer weather; a currency that has repeatedly inflicted exchange losses; and a family ownership structure that public investors must take largely on trust. Walton has already transformed Bangladesh’s electronics industry once, by proving that refrigerators, televisions and compressors could be made at scale in Gazipur rather than imported. Whether it can repeat that trick in export markets will decide if it becomes the global brand its founders’ family envisions, or remains a dominant but essentially domestic champion.
