IMAGE: CG
IN APRIL Forbes, a business magazine, revised Binod Chaudhary’s net worth upward to $2.1bn, placing him 1,982nd on its global billionaire rankings. The revision was a milestone of sorts: it was the first time the wealth of Nepal’s only billionaire had crossed the $2bn threshold. It was also, for anyone watching the internal architecture of the Chaudhary Group, a moment to note that the man who built that fortune is now 71 years old, that he lost his parliamentary seat in March elections, and that the group he chairs—CG Corp Global, as it is formally known—is in the midst of the most consequential transition in its four-decade history.
The Chaudhary Group is not a company. It is more accurately described as a family-controlled holding structure encompassing over 160 companies operating across 30 countries, in sectors that include instant noodles and food processing, hotels and hospitality, banking, cement, electronics, healthcare and real estate. Its most famous asset is Wai Wai, the instant noodle brand that Binod introduced to Nepal in the mid-1980s under a technical licensing arrangement with Thai Preserved Food Factory—a Thai company that had originally created the brand in Thailand in 1972.
Chaudhary Group purchased the rights to manufacture and distribute Wai Wai across South Asia, built factories in Nepal and India, and turned what was a Thai snack into the subcontinent’s most recognisable instant noodle. The Indian unit alone now generates annual revenue of some Rs8bn ($52.3m), making CG Foods India’s Wai Wai one of the country’s most prominent noodle brands and a competitor to Nestle’s Maggi and ITC’s Yippee.
The group also has a presence in central and eastern Europe through a vegetable processing business acquired in Hungary in 2006, a controlling stake in Nabil Bank, management contracts with Taj Hotels for Nepali properties, and a portfolio of assets assembled over four decades by a man who began his business career managing his family’s trading house as a teenager in Kathmandu.
That empire is now being handed, in stages, to three sons. Nirvana, the eldest, oversees Nepal operations and the group’s domestic finance and hospitality interests. He is also a mountaineer, author and former national squash player who has been active in the Chaudhary Foundation, the family’s philanthropic arm. Rahul, the middle son, manages international business, including the group’s Indian and Singapore operations, and serves as managing director of the group. Varun, the youngest, was appointed global chief executive of CG Foods in early 2025, taking over from Manvendra Amber Shukla, who had himself replaced the legendary GP Sah—Gajananda Prasad Sah Kalwar—who had run CG Foods for 23 years before departing to set up Yasoda Foods and its rival noodle brand, Current Noodles.
The Varun appointment is the most significant of the three, because CG Foods is the group’s flagship business and because its immediate challenge is the most concrete. When Manvendra Shukla took over as global CEO in October 2022, he told Bloomberg, a news outlet, and others that CG Foods India would go public—listing on an Indian stock exchange—in the first quarter of 2026.
That listing has not happened. As of June, there is no confirmed filing with India’s Securities and Exchange Board. CG Foods India had been targeting 15% annual revenue growth through new product launches and small acquisitions in the noodle-adjacent food sector as the preconditions for a credible IPO.
The wider ambition, articulated by Varun upon his appointment, is to transform CG Foods from a company defined by a single product into a diversified multi-category food business with a turnover target of $19bn. The distance between $95m in Indian revenues today and $19bn at any horizon is the clearest single expression of the scale of ambition the next generation has been tasked with delivering.
The choice of Varun—and the relatively rapid departure of two professional CEOs before him—reflects the tension at the heart of the succession. Binod Chaudhary has, for most of the group’s modern history, combined the role of strategic visionary, lead dealmaker and public face in ways that a professional manager can never replicate.
GP Sah ran CG Foods operationally for 23 years, but the major strategic calls—expanding into India, entering European food processing, taking management contracts with Taj Hotels for Nepali properties—were Binod’s. Shukla, brought in from outside with a remit to professionalise the food business ahead of a public listing, lasted two and a half years. The appointment of Varun as his replacement is, at one level, a recognition that the transition from founder-led to professionally-managed will not happen as fast as the IPO timetable suggested. It is also a bet that family ownership and direct family management of the crown jewel is the right structure for the immediate term.
His stated agenda—ie pivot from single-product identity to multi-category food company, invest in research and development, build modern retail partnerships including e-commerce—is strategically coherent. It is also a big departure from the group’s traditional mode of growth through acquisition and market penetration, and it will require building internal capabilities that the group does not currently have at scale.
The bigger succession question is structural rather than personal. CG Corp Global is a conglomerate in the classic Asian family-business mould: diversified, relationship-driven, opaque about its internal financials and held together as much by Binod’s personal relationships with governments, banks and business partners across thirty countries as by any formal management architecture. The transition from a conglomerate that works because of one person’s relationships to one that works because of institutional processes and professional management is one of the hardest problems in business strategy.
Most Asian family conglomerates that have navigated it successfully—the Tata Group in India, Samsung in South Korea—did so over decades and through specific governance reforms: independent boards, public listings of subsidiaries, separation of family ownership from family management and the cultivation of professional managers who are empowered to make decisions without reference upwards.
The Chaudhary Group has not made those moves publicly, and the decision to bring Varun in as CG Foods CEO rather than completing the professionalisation process that Shukla represented is, at minimum, a signal that the transition will follow its own path rather than a textbook. That is not necessarily wrong.
The group’s track record of ignoring received wisdom about conglomerate management and succeeding anyway spans four decades. Binod Chaudhary built a billion-dollar business in a country where the infrastructure, the regulation and the capital markets all conspired against it. It would be rash to assume that his sons, working in an environment materially better than the one he started in, will not find their own version of the same formula.
What is certain is that the window for the Indian IPO, which was the group’s clearest public statement of ambition, has slipped. A listing deferred is not a listing cancelled, and Varun’s appointment may be the precursor to a more solid operational foundation before the listing proceeds.
But the delay is a reminder that succession in a family conglomerate is not an event—not the moment when the founder steps back and the sons step forward—but a process that takes longer.
Binod Chaudhary spent four decades building something extraordinary. The tough question—ie how to hand it over without losing what made it extraordinary—is the one his sons are now living with, and that Nepal’s only billion-dollar business is answering, one appointment at a time. ■
