66 | FORBES ASIA JULY 2016
FORBES ASIA
ARUN PUDUR
phone call, a city government spokesman said no one by
the name of Wang Zhen-Ying has ever worked there.
Rhulani Garrine, of what he says is the Johannesburg-
based Yaden Group, said he has been a Celframe distribu-
tor in Africa for more than eight years and has shipped
millions of units. He said Celframe’s Africa business was
worth close to $1 billion last year. Despite the supposedly
large volume of business, the Yaden Group doesn’t ap-
pear to have a website.
Celframe claimed several U.S. multinationals as its
customers, but FORBES ASIA could not confirm that
they are. A query to Boeing got this response: “Our re-
cords do not show Celframe as a supplier to the Boeing
Co.” GE Asia said it didn’t know the company. Pudur now
says both companies “used to be” customers but haven’t
been for more than a year. MTV did not respond.
With doughnut chain Krispy Kreme, Celframe sup-
plied the Gmail address and name of a person who
claimed to oversee technology procurement for one of
the “Top 2 doughnut companies in the world and I don’t
like Dunkin :-).” It seemed she was alluding to Krispy
Kreme, but it was unclear why she wouldn’t say so out-
right. She also asked that we not give her name because
the company hadn’t cleared her to have her name used.
She said the chain has been using Celframe products
since 2009 in most of its global operations,
paying up to $100 million in fees a year. Many
large U.S. companies use Celframe, she said,
though “Celframe isn’t very pro-active in
making noise about their clients.” Asked for
evidence of her identity, the executive said
she was chosen to head technology procure-
ment “for two reasons, one is my online pres-
ence is minimal and secondly, I was the first
to discover Celframe.” A search online did not
find anyone in technology with the same name
at any company worldwide. Direct queries to
Krispy Kreme did not get a response.
Seated in a glass-partitioned conference
room in the Kuala Lumpur office for his inter-
view with FORBES ASIA, Pudur says his com-
pany was built on “the backs of the government
and SME sector [small and medium-size enter-
prises]. No doubt we did bag a few top multina-
tionals because that is what people want to hear,
but that is not our story.” His wife of nearly two
years, Eliena Pudur, a Celframe director, says,
“Our business model is such that every license
we ever sold was through a partner.”
By his own telling, Arun Pudur’s story is
a tale of spectacular success. He grew up in
Chennai and Bangalore in an upper-middle-
class family, and he says his entrepreneurial
journey started in 1990 when he was 13. With
a $130 investment from his mother, he says he
set up a repair shop to fix Honda scooters. The
shop did so well that “Honda’s Japanese execu-
tives came to study how I had built my busi-
ness.” He opened several other shops, but after
starting at Bangalore University, he sold the
chain and turned to the less time-consuming business
of breeding pedigreed dogs. He says he was soon selling
Great Dane and Rottweiler pups for “astronomical sums.”
He majored in economics, banking and commerce in
college and after graduation worked on commission at
a computer training center. Feeling underpaid, he quit
and launched Celframe in 2000 in Bangalore to offer
medical-transcription and business-process outsourcing
to U.S. customers. He claims the company reached $1 bil-
lion in sales the year he turned 26. “I went from travel-
ing by public buses growing up in India to fractionallyCelframe’s latest version of its office software, dated 2008.