Three years ago, Mevan Peiris had eighteen people and one office. Today Global Marine Group Sri Lanka handles roughly 8% of Sri Lanka’s container throughput, runs ten subsidiaries across three countries and is growing at 37% year-on-year. He says that’s still just the floor.
Those ten subsidiaries span Sri Lanka, Singapore and Dubai and were built in two to three years, alongside around 20 foreign partners, some of them the world’s largest ship owners and port operators. Peiris expects the 8% share to keep climbing as the Colombo West International Terminal comes fully online later this year, with the East Container Terminal about a year behind. Almost none of it is acquisition. “Almost all of it has been organic,” he says, crediting his team and the international partnerships of some of the biggest ship owners and operators in the world, who chose to back a three-year-old company. The ambition is to become one of the top five maritime groups in Sri Lanka, but the numbers are a start: “Eight percent isn’t the ceiling for us. It’s the floor.”
The curve is unusual for where it began. Peiris walked away from a thirty-six-year-old, family-built maritime group, where he was the third-highest-ranking officer with close to a thousand people under him, to start again with eighteen people and one office.
The Sixth-of-the-Salary Decision
Peiris got his sea legs before he could walk. His father captained for the Ceylon Shipping Corporation, when ships sat in port seven to ten days rather than today’s eight or twelve hours, so from six months old until preschool Mevan lived on board. What stayed was “the smell of marine paint hitting a salty sea breeze”; boarding a ship still opens a portal back to childhood.
After an internship at CINEC and a Bachelor of Business Management at Monash University, where his father covered tuition but left living expenses to him (a part-time BP service station job taught him humility and respect for unglamorous work), he joined Australian National Line. Promoted three times in five years, from trainee to state operations executive to cargo superintendent, he had a good salary, his own apartment, a sports car and a planner’s role at a Melbourne container terminal waiting.
Then a close friend in Australia lost his father and couldn’t get home in time to say goodbye. “That shook something loose in me,” Peiris says. With family most important and his sister overseas too, he came home to the family business, whatever it paid: “It was never about the money. It was about family.” He took a sixth of his Australian salary, and calls it one of his best decisions.
His father ran the household “almost like a military operation” while quietly building a major maritime group; his mother supplied the compassion, largely single-handedly, raising him and his sister. Both agreed he must earn his own living, so on returning in 2012 he started as a Business Development Manager on a modest salary, by design. “You don’t get handed anything because of your surname.” He volunteered for underperforming units in healthcare, freight forwarding and logistics, moving through intern, trainee, employee, director and owner’s son. “I know the ropes,” he says.
Doubling Down, Then Tripling
In 2018 Peiris set himself a target nobody asked for: double revenue within five years. The company hit it in 2021, two years early, and across his tenure as Director of Business Development the business scaled roughly fivefold, COVID included. “It was about proving to myself that I was worthy of the opportunity I’d been given,” he says.
When COVID stranded thousands of seafarers, he connected what the company already had, an airport in Mattala, a port in Galle, highways and resorts, into a plan for quarantine, transport and logistics. “The idea is always the easy part,” he says; approval and execution is where good ideas die. He knew people who could move fast, and the plan became a foreign exchange earner during an active crisis. He was later asked to chair the industry’s Special Committee for Crew Change Logistics, and six years on it is still cited as a case study.
Recognition rarely attached to him personally, a reality of being second generation: “You never fully step out from under the first generation’s shadow.” He made peace early: “I did it for the company and for the industry.”
Walking Away From Everything
By 2023 Mevan had reached a value decision, not a financial one: “The corporate environment around me no longer aligned with my values.” The pull to build something of his own had grown for years, even after being named among Sri Lanka’s Top 100 Entrepreneurs in 2019 and being tied to the family brand since childhood. He left it all for eighteen people and one office, “with my wife and son cheering me on from the sidelines.” Three years later, he says, it was the best decision he’s made.
Rebuilding was harder in some ways. People asked what his company even did, and despite his having led a division of a major multinational shipping line, banks treated it as a brand-new, unproven entity, “something that genuinely needs to change for the entrepreneurs coming up.” Relationships built on track record carried over. Global Feeders, which he began working with in 2018, was among the first partners; when it merged with AD Ports Group, it confirmed his belief, and they partnered with him almost immediately, which he calls “fate and a little bit of luck.” Singapore, the world’s biggest maritime hub, and Dubai were strategic from day one: a major hub plus a foothold in emerging markets.
Global Marine was also recently certified a Great Place to Work, which he treats as a checkpoint. Starting from nothing let him choose leaders who believed in doing things the right way, not just the profitable way. “It’s a reminder to keep showing up for our people the way we promised back when there were only eighteen of us.”
Still Mid-Career
Ask Mevan what winning looks like and the answer isn’t a revenue figure. It’s building solutions that make customers’ businesses run better and helping an industry Sri Lanka has undersold for years earn global recognition, as one of the top five maritime groups in the country, diversified and grown deliberately rather than recklessly. “I don’t want growth we can’t sustain. I want it built for the long haul.” His philosophy: “I’m not building businesses. I’m building relationships. Don’t follow paths, create trails.”
