64 | FORBES ASIA JULY 2016
FORBES ASIA
ARUN PUDUR
as an underwater-cable operator that will supply 30% of
all Internet service to Indonesia. All in all, Pudur Corp.
claims it operates in 20 industries and 70 countries—gen-
erating $13.4 billion in revenue last year and reaping $3.6
billion in net profits.
This would be enough to make Pudur a billionaire
many times over—since, he says, he owns nearly all of
the company—and, indeed, at least one firm that tracks
wealth says he is a billionaire. Wealth-X of Singapore last
year ranked him as the tenth-richest person in the world
under 40, with a $4 billion fortune. That won the India
native a flood of LinkedIn requests, a Twitter following
that’s nearly 150,000-strong, and glowing stories in The
Economic Times in India and elsewhere. Bloomberg had
him speak in December at its ASEAN Business Summit
in Bangkok. The topic: Entrepreneurship: Turning Ideas
Into Global Success Stories. Earlier, Twitter included
him in an e-book it published titled “Tweets From the
Top,” amid a collection from Asia-Pacific leaders, includ-
ing South Korea President Park Geun-hye, India Prime
Minister Narendra Modi and Mahindra Group Chairman
Anand Mahindra.
However, Pudur’s business empire—and his billions—
may be largely fiction. FORBES ASIA e-mailed 25 people
on a list supplied by Pudur Corp. of customers, distributor-
partners and business associates. None of those who re-
sponded corroborated the supposed scale of his operation.
Nearly half used Gmail, Yahoo or other personal e-mail
addresses instead of company or official addresses. Some
did not turn up in online searches and were invisible on
professional networks such as LinkedIn and CrunchBase.
Suspicions were first raised when our reporter visited
the company headquarters in December to interview
Pudur. For a business putatively so large, its profile in
downtown Kuala Lumpur is notably low-key. Its offices
occupy just one part of the 7th floor in a 26-story build-
ing. There are no exterior signs proclaiming its presence.
Inside, when a visitor wants to use a restroom, it turns
out to be a facility shared with other tenants at the end
of a maze of corridors. Pudur says his operation has only
132 employees, which is remarkable given that his flag-
ship technology unit—Celframe—spent $1.6 billion on
research & development in 2014, according to its latest
annual report. But he says most of that work is out-
sourced and that there are another 13,700 “indirect” or
remote workers.
Pudur certainly likes to call himself a billionaire, and
he agrees with Wealth-X that he’s worth $4 billion. As
one of Pudur’s tweets,
hashtagged #lifelessons,
says: “People buy you,
your stories, your magic,
never your products or
services.”
FORBES has been
tracking the world’s
billionaires since 1987
and has never included
him on our annual list.
That hasn’t stopped him
from trying to insert
himself, Zelig-like, into
our rankings. Referring
to the 2015 list, he says
he “ranks in the Top 20
of Global Indian Bil-
lionaires in the Forbes
Billionaire ranking and Rank #6 among his billionaire
counterparts in Malaysia Forbes ranking,” according to
his profile posted on CrunchBase. “His net worth of $4
billion puts him at same rank of #418 as Anil Ambani of
India in the [worldwide] Forbes List.”
If privately held Pudur Corp. really did produce the
revenue and profits that the auditors signed off on—$13.4
billion and $3.6 billion—then FORBES would probably
estimate his wealth at much more than $4 billion. This
assumes that he and his wife own 85% of the company,
with his mother holding 5% and the Pudur Foundation
10%, as he says they do. But it’s not likely the company is
producing anywhere close to the revenue and profits it
claims, and he may not be worth much at all.
When FORBES ASIA asked for financials for 2015, he
provided unaudited figures, saying the audited figures
wouldn’t be out for several months. So instead we asked
for the 2014 audited figures, but he demurred. Then the
company suddenly did provide an auditors’ report, but it
stated that it was for 2013; the company later correctedRhymes of the times: Pudur’s inspirational tweets earned him a place in a Twitter e-book.