Nepal's first billionaire success story in English memoir

High ambition, organisation building, market awareness and keeping oneself updated about trends are among the mantras that Nepal's first billionaire industrialist Binod Chaudhary spells out for entrepreneurial success.

In his autobiography "Making it Big" (Penguin Random House), the 61-year-old Nepali businessman of Indian origin talks about banking on his experiences to "make decisions that even a Harvard professor would recoil from without several rounds of surveys".

The chairperson of Chaudhary Group (CG), a conglomerate of 122 companies that include banking, insurance, finance, hotels, food, real estate, retail and electronics and has collaboration among others with the Taj Group, is famed for creating the Wai Wai brand of instant noodles, which has expanded into India.

The story of Wai Wai, says Chaudhary began around 35 years ago when a friend noticed large quantities of the noodles arriving on the Bangkok-Kathmandu flights into a market that imported a large quantity of Nestle India Limited's Maggi.

Chaudhary ventured into the market and grew into a company that has "sold more than a billion packets in India" and sells in over 35 countries.

The baron writes about how he used a four-pronged approach to fight challenges by launching many cheaper brands, producing creative advertisements and creative programmes and changing the organisational structure to include more locals to create a company with an annual turnover of Rs 250 crore.

The creation of his first multinational venture Taj Asia and the struggles in his partnership with the Taj Group are also detailed.

There is also mention of the part played by Chaudhary in reuniting Nepali migrant boy Jeet Bahadur with his family in Nepal in 2012.

In the memoir, Chaudhary also traces the origins of his family, particularly his grandfather who was born in Shekhawati in Rajasthan and who moved to Nepal when he was less than 20 years old to open a textile store.

Chaudhary's father set up Nepal's first department store and Chaudhary joined the business at age 18 and went on to be listed in the Forbes's list of billionaires.