Binod Chaudhary: First man from Nepal in Forbes billionaire list

When Binod Chaudhary first came to Dubai in 1990, the iPhone was yet to be invented, there was no Facebook, and Dubai was a fledgling city with more sand than infrastructure.

The businessman from Nepal, who was negotiating with Emirates Bank to buy its stake in his home city Kathmandu’s Nabil Bank, would rush to Dubai Creek from the airport, finish his work, and then rush back home, without any desire to linger behind.

He was looking to branch out in India, Thailand and Singapore and the UAE held little interest for him. Then came 2004 and a fateful visit to Egypt.

“My friend was the CEO of a hotel in Dubai and he insisted that I transit in the Emirate,” says the 58-year-old, who has been coming back again and again since then. I saw a changed Dubai. There was construction going on everywhere. Jebel Ali, which had seemed a different territory, had been linked. Life was changing. This was the place to be in.”

Recognising opportunity, Chaudhary began shopping like mad. His purchases included nearly 300 apartments in Discovery Gardens and some more in International City.

But the timing was wrong and in 2008, after having almost quadrupled in value from 2004, the property market collapsed.

“It was a big blow,” he says sombrely. “Prices went down by almost 75 per cent. A lot of investors pulled out but still we didn’t leave. Now we feel the whole region is coming back again.”

Tenacity is a family virtue, indeed, a virtue of the community the Chaudharys hail from. More than a century ago, his grandfather Bhuramal Chaudhary, then just 18, came from Rajasthan in India with a bundle of textiles to make his fortune in neighbouring Nepal.

Besides being vegetarians, the Marwari community is famous for its business acumen, creating prosperity out of nothing and sheer hard work. The family business started with Bhuramal paying house calls on the Ranas, Nepal’s aristocracy who held all the power and riches, selling his merchandise.

Today, the Chaudhary Group is a conglomerate, dealing in enterprises as vastly different as banks, schools, real estate and fast moving consumer goods.

It was the last category that helped Chaudhary make his personal fortune. During a trip from Thailand, he saw hordes of Nepalis alighting from the plane carrying packets of instant noodles, the Himalayan nation’s staple food, eaten both cooked in hot water and uncooked.

That, he realised, was the ideal product to manufacture since the family mill was already churning out a large amount of flour. Thus was Wai Wai, the slightly yellowish, thin instant noodles with a pungent taste, born.

It is now the market leader in Nepal and accounts for 20 per cent sale in India, vying with global competitors like Nestle’s Maggi and the Japanese Top Ramen.

Chaudhary plans to make his little noodles go a long way. His dream is to become the global leader. “And for that, you need an uninterrupted supply chain,” he says. “I realised I couldn’t do it by manufacturing in Nepal and shipping it out. To compete with the giants, you have to have either deep pockets to splurge on advertising or have better penetration.”

It’s what he calls his “guerrilla strategy”, an apt description, coming as he does from a country that was racked by a 10-year guerrilla war waged by communists. So now besides the factories in Nepal, as part of the guerrilla strategy, there are five more in India and one run with an associate in Thailand.

Chaudhary is eyeing Saudi Arabia or Qatar to set up a new factory that will cater to the GCC states, Africa and central Asia.

It has been no bed of roses. The Maoist insurgency hit security and infrastructure in Nepal, businessmen were extorted and power generation plummeted, leaving the state with up to 18 hours of power outage daily.

There were 22 governments in 10 years, adding to the instability and chaos. Plus there were antiquated investment policies that prevented investment abroad.

So Chaudhary chose to send two of his three sons abroad, in Dubai and Singapore, from where to run the new company, Cinnovation, focusing on hotels in India, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Southeast Asia and recently, in Africa.

Cinnovation wants to launch its Zinc brand of hotels in the Gulf as well and a chain of schools in collaboration with a Singapore-based partner.

All this enterprise, coming from a country that despite its natural resources is still one of the poorest in the globe, has caught the eye of the outside world. This year, as a tribute to that, Forbes named him in its list of billionaires, the first Nepali to achieve that distinction. “I call that my Nobel,” he says with a gleam of satisfaction.

But despite the recognition and the fact that he is teaching his three sons the intricacies of running the family empire, Binod Chaudhary is not ready to rest on his laurels.

There’s a project that’s still not completed. In 2008, after the civil war had ended in Nepal and elections were held to choose a constituent assembly to write a new constitution, Chaudhary was nominated to be one of the writers.

However, the 601-member constituent assembly failed to complete its task within the two-year deadline. After repeated extensions of the deadline, finally, the college was dissolved. Next month, Nepal goes to the hustings once again to elect a new constituent assembly.

“I was in the constituent assembly because I wanted to be part of the constitution-writing that would frame the country’s economic policies,” he explains.

“We need water — even people in Kathmandu, the capital, have to buy drinking water from tankers. We need electricity. There are 16 hours’ power cuts daily though Nepal is rich in rivers that can produce hydropower. And we need jobs. Every day 1,000 young men go abroad in search of jobs.

“It’s so embarrassing. People ask me, you are a billionaire and recognised in different parts of the world. Yet Nepal is so poor. Why is that?”

The reason, he answers, is the political leaders of Nepal who have been squandering away time, opportunity and resources trying to pull one another down instead of reviving the economy.

So he dreams of a situation where people will support an agenda of development and a new leadership.“Nitish Kumar transformed Bihar in five years,” he says, referring to the Indian politician acknowledged as having changed the face of one of India’s poorest states as its chief minister. “If I have political backing, I can transform Nepal too in five years.”

sudeshna@khaleejtimes.com