Kirit joined in 1975, when the head office still consisted of just his father, five employees and one of the city's few telex machines. He took over in 1979, after his father had a stroke, and launched an enormous expansion, fueled by the new affluence of the Middle East and the more well-off parts of Africa. He expanded beyond rice to other commodities and traveled for months at a time. "The merchant who used to order 50 tons of rice now had a market for 500 tons," he recalls. "Then they needed edible oil. They'd want maize, sugar, pineapple. I'd say, 'You need uniforms. There are all these construction workers, they need gumboots.' Then they'd need steel, timber, bitumen, asphalt, cement."