Khatijah Ahmad, Founder and Chairman, KAF Group, Malaysia (int’l edition)

IN THE 25 YEARS SINCE KHATIJAH AHMAD FOUNDED HER FINANCIAL-SERVICES BUSINESS, she has developed an intuitive market sense and a contrarian spirit. While economic crisis has racked financial institutions throughout Malaysia, Khatijah’s KAF Group is poised to report one of its best years ever. As one of the few successful female entrepreneurs in a male-dominated Muslim society, Khatijah, 59, has used her skills to challenge societal barriers and build her business. KAF, which stands for Khatijah and family, is Malaysia’s largest bond and money-market trading house, with annual trading turnover of $13 billion. Analysts estimate KAF will report profits of more than $50 million for fiscal 1998–67% higher than precrisis profits of $30 million. ”You can make money all the way down and all the way up,” she says, ”as long as you know which part of the cycle you’re in and what you are doing.”

Khatijah comes from an affluent Malay family that had real estate and rubber holdings. Her genteel upbringing emphasized public service over the hurly-burly business world. Her father was a conservative Muslim but was progressive-minded enough to want a broad education for his two daughters. So he sent them to Catholic school. He also sent Khatijah to the London School of Economics, where she earned a B.S. in 1965.

She returned home to a bureaucrat’s job at the National Rice Board, but she was bored: ”I wanted to try something where ideas can be translated into results.” So after Malaysia adopted a floating-rate exchange system in 1973, Khatijah shocked friends and family by quitting her job, mortgaging her home, and starting a foreign exchange trading business. Her father wasn’t pleased, but she proved him wrong with profits in her first year. She learned her iconoclasm from her father anyway. ”By putting us in unconventional situations, he was unknowingly preparing me for unconventional enterprises,” she says.

Khatijah suspects she has to work harder than if she were a man, but she figures that’s a plus. ”There are deals cut at certain levels that I definitely miss,” she says. ”So we have to be innovative. We have to find ways to have a competitive advantage.” So far, she has that in abundance.

http://www.businessweek.com/1999/99_24/b3633080.htm