Beyond the billion-dollar myth: Why Sri Lanka’s business narrative needs reimagining

When analysts point out that Sri Lanka has only a handful of listed companies valued over a billion dollars compared to Singapore’s 77 or Vietnam’s 44, the instinctive response is often: “We need more billion-dollar companies.” But this misses a more fundamental question that communications professionals should be asking: Is corporate gigantism really the goal?

Perhaps the more revealing statistic isn’t how few billion-dollar companies we have, but how many mid-sized businesses are stuck, unable to access capital, expand sustainably, or tell their stories effectively. Perhaps the problem isn’t that we lack corporate giants, but that we’ve failed to build an ecosystem where diverse businesses across multiple scales can thrive, innovate, and create meaningful value.

This is where the narrative needs to shift, and where PR and communications professionals have a critical strategic role to play.

The real gap: From growth capital to growth stories

When the Asian Development Bank projects Sri Lanka’s growth slowing from 3.9pct in 2025 to 3.3pct in 2026 and with US tariffs threatening $634 million in exports and 16,000 jobs, mostly female apparel workers, the communication failure isn’t about celebrating big companies. It’s about the silence around adaptation, resilience, and alternative pathways.

Where are the stories of medium-sized exporters who’ve successfully pivoted to non-traditional markets? Where are the narratives about companies choosing sustainable growth over extractive expansion? Where are the case studies of businesses that prioritised worker welfare and innovation over quarterly revenue targets, and succeeded because of it, not despite it?

The fixation on billion-dollar valuations obscures a more important conversation: How do we build an economy where businesses of all sizes, from artisan cooperatives to tech startups to family enterprises, can access the resources, markets, and credibility they need to create value?

Sri Lanka’s capital markets don’t just lack depth and liquidity; they lack diversity of thought. Venture capital remains underdeveloped not because we don’t have capital, but because we haven’t communicated alternative models of success convincingly enough. When every “success story” looks like corporate consolidation and market domination, we shouldn’t be surprised when investors can’t imagine other possibilities.

The innovation paradox: Small can be significant

Here’s an uncomfortable truth: few Sri Lankan corporates are genuinely innovation-driven, and the ecosystem for research, startups, and technology remains shallow. But the solution isn’t to copy Silicon Valley’s “grow fast or die” model. It’s to communicate what innovation actually looks like in the Sri Lankan context.

Take the upcoming Sri Lanka Economic & Investment Summit in December, exploring opportunities in cinnamon, seafood, electronics, minerals, and advanced manufacturing. These sectors don’t need billion-dollar corporations to succeed. They need well-capitalised, efficiently-run, technology-enabled businesses that can compete on quality, sustainability, and specialisation.

A cinnamon exporter that uses blockchain for supply chain transparency, pays fair wages, and commands premium pricing in niche markets might never be “worth a billion dollars.” But it creates more sustainable value—economic, social, environmental—than a bloated conglomerate optimising for market cap.

The communications challenge is to make these stories as compelling as the unicorn narratives that dominate global business media. We need to shift the conversation from “How big can you get?” to “How much value can you create, and for whom?”

The policy communication disconnect

When the government underspends on poverty alleviation—failing to meet even the IMF’s modest target of 0.7% of GDP on social safety nets—while a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line, the communication failure is profound.

This isn’t just bad policy; it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what creates a healthy business environment. Child malnutrition increased from 12.2% to 17% between 2021 and 2024. Over half of households use coping mechanisms like skipping meals. These aren’t just humanitarian crises, they’re market failures and demand destruction in real time.

Smart communications professionals should be making the business case for inclusive growth, not as corporate social responsibility window-dressing, but as economic necessity. You cannot build a thriving economy, of any scale, on widespread poverty and food insecurity.

Yet the narrative around “business-friendly policy” rarely includes wealth taxes, progressive taxation, or strengthened social safety nets. When the World Bank reports that focusing on high-earning individuals could increase Personal Income Tax revenue by 169%, and when direct taxes primarily impact the richest 10% of Sri Lankans, why isn’t the business community communicating support for these measures?

Because too often, “business interests” are defined narrowly as “what helps large corporations and wealthy individuals pay less tax” rather than “what creates stable, inclusive conditions for diverse businesses to flourish.”

Reimagining corporate success: A communications framework

So what would a reimagined communications strategy look like? One that moves beyond billion-dollar ambitions to sustainable value creation? Here are five principles:

1. Value creation over valuation

Instead of celebrating market capitalisation, communicate impact metrics: jobs created (and their quality), innovation deployed, sustainability practices, worker welfare, community investment, and long-term resilience.

This isn’t greenwashing. It’s a fundamental reframing of what “success” means. When the Construction PMI hits 61.1 in August with project availability increasing, the story shouldn’t just be about growth. It should be about whether that growth includes decent work, environmental standards, and local procurement.

2. Diversification as strategy, not weakness

The focus on billion-dollar companies often comes with an implicit assumption that “focus” and “specialisation” mean doing one thing at massive scale. But in a small, vulnerable economy like Sri Lanka’s, diversification isn’t a weakness, it’s survival.

Communications teams should be telling stories about businesses that successfully operate across multiple sectors, serve different market segments, or maintain portfolio approaches that provide resilience against shocks. The economy expanded 4.8pct year-on-year in Q1 2025 not because of corporate giants, but because of diversified activity across manufacturing, construction, and services.

3. Sustainable internationalisation

Yes, too many Sri Lankan companies remain dependent on local markets. But the solution isn’t just “go global at any cost.” It’s strategic internationalisation that builds capabilities, transfers knowledge, and creates sustainable competitive advantages.

When Japan’s JETRO highlights Sri Lanka’s potential in graphite for lithium-ion batteries, the opportunity isn’t to create a billion-dollar mining conglomerate. It’s to build a cluster of specialised, technologically sophisticated businesses that compete on quality and sustainability, and to communicate that positioning effectively in international markets.

4. Transparent trade-offs

Every business decision involves trade-offs. Growing fast often means cutting corners. Maximising shareholder returns can mean squeezing workers or suppliers. Expanding market share might require practices that aren’t sustainable long-term.

What if communications professionals led conversations about these trade-offs honestly? What if, instead of spinning every decision as win-win, we acknowledged that building sustainable businesses means sometimes choosing stakeholders over shareholders, or choosing long-term resilience over short-term growth?

This kind of transparency would be radical and credibility-building in Sri Lanka’s current environment.

5. Redefining “Competitiveness”

When private credit grew 19.6pct in July, driven partly by vehicle imports, is that a sign of healthy economic activity or unsustainable consumption? When worker remittances rise 19.3pct and the current account surplus grows 30.2pct, is that economic strength or dependence on labor export?

Communications professionals should be helping stakeholders think critically about what “competitive” actually means. A competitive economy isn’t necessarily one with the biggest companies. It’s one where businesses can operate efficiently, fairly, and sustainably across different scales and sectors.

From narrative deficit to narrative diversity

The real problem isn’t that Sri Lanka has only three billion-dollar companies. It’s that we have one dominant narrative about what business success looks like—and it’s imported, ill-fitting, and ultimately harmful.

We need narrative diversity to match the diverse economy we should be building. Stories about:

Family businesses that have sustained themselves across generations through prudent management, not aggressive expansion

Cooperatives that create value for members rather than distant shareholders

Social enterprises that balance profit with purpose

Tech startups that prioritise solving local problems over chasing venture capital valuations

Exporters that compete on quality and ethics, not just price

Manufacturers that invest in worker skills and environmental practices

These stories exist. They’re just not being told with the sophistication, consistency, and strategic intent they deserve. 

The communicator›s challenge

For PR and communications professionals, this represents both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is to resist the easy narrative of “bigger is better” and instead craft more nuanced, evidence-based stories about sustainable value creation. The opportunity is to help reshape how success is defined and measured in Sri Lankan business.

This means advising clients and organisations to think beyond traditional metrics. It means pushing back when “growth at all costs” is presented as the only strategy. It means making the case that in a resource-constrained, climate-vulnerable, socially diverse nation like Sri Lanka, resilience and sustainability aren’t optional extras. They’re core business imperatives.

Most importantly, it means recognising that in an era of heightened inequality, climate crisis, and social instability, the old narratives about corporate success are not just inadequate—they’re actively harmful. The world doesn’t need more billion-dollar companies built on exploitation and extraction. It needs businesses of all scales that create genuine value for multiple stakeholders over the long term.

Sri Lanka has an opportunity to communicate a different model, one that other small, vulnerable economies might actually want to learn from. But it requires communications professionals willing to challenge conventional wisdom, tell more complex stories, and ultimately, reimagine what success looks like.

The question isn’t whether we can create more billion-dollar companies. It’s whether we can create an economy where diverse businesses thrive, workers flourish, communities benefit, and the environment is respected, regardless of anyone’s market capitalisation.

That’s a narrative worth building. And it starts with communicators brave enough to tell it. 

The author welcomes responses and debate on these ideas. Sri Lanka’s economic future depends not on mimicking other countries’ models of success, but on defining our own, and communicating it compellingly.

(The writer is managing director of a boutique PR agency with over 14 years’ experience. He is a PRCA APAC board member, serving on various committees of PRCA and CIPR, and was named in Campaign Asia-Pacific’s 40 Under 40 for 2024.)