Nepal’s richest man–noodle king Binod Chaudhary–said his group has already handed out hundreds of thousands of packets of Wai Wai noodles and plans to build thousands of homes for the victims of last month’s massive quake.
His Chaudhary Group is Nepal’s largest conglomerate with revenues of more than $800 million. It has interests in everything from cement to hotels to supermarkets but its best known brand is Wai Wai.
The group sells about two billion packets of the instant noodles worldwide every year
The 7.8-magnitude earthquake on April 25 created cracks in the group’s headquarters in Katmandu, forcing it temporarily to shift operations to its cafeteria in a separate building.
To manage its business as well as its contributions to relief, the group eventually had to move 500 employees out of the headquarters to offices outside of Katmandu that were less affected. The group was forced to halt production at its cement factory until Monday and its computer servers in Nepal were also temporarily down.
With much of Nepal’s infrastructure damaged, it will take months for production, distribution and consumption to return to normal.
“It has been extremely challenging,” Mr. Chaudhary told The Wall Street Journal in an interview Saturday.
While many of the group’s 6,000 employees had to sleep outdoors for a few days, none were killed by the quake and its production facilities in the district of Nawalparasi, more than 100 miles west of the capital, were undamaged.
The quake will not hurt Wai Wai sales, Mr. Chaudhury said, because the six factories that produce the noodles in Nepal have remained intact and the group’s eight other manufacturing plants are in India.
When the quake hit, Mr. Chaudhary was at the site of one of his latest projects – a safari lodge in Nepal’s Chitwan National Park–when the ground beneath him began to move. The water in the pool he was standing next to was sloshing back and forth, he said.
He quickly set out by road for Katmandu. The usually four-hour trip took about half the regular time because the roads were so empty. When he arrived, Katmandu was in a state of “spellbound silence,” he said.
Since the quake, the Chaudhary Group says it has distributed 500,000 packets of noodles, thousands of cartons of juice and seven tons of other food and water. It has also set up a relief center with doctors in Katmandu.
