
Today, 37-year old Arief is managing director of the PTS Media Group, a publishing company with an annual turnover of RM30 million.
Speaking at the Singapore Writers Festival recently, Arief presented some pretty impressive figures including the fact that some of their titles, especially low price Islamic titles and cookbooks, have sold more than a million copies and that some of their authors earn six-figure annual royalty.

But Arief is getting restless. The university drop out has come a long way. What next for him and the publishing company he has grown from when it was a start up? Arief is a strategic planner and PTS is often ahead of other publishers from first publishing Malay teen novels to playing an active role in social media. At a publishing symposium this year, Dato' Husammuddin, industry veteran and CEO of the large Karangkraf Media Group acknowledged that his company emulated PTS in reaching out to their readers through social media.