Bhat-Bhateni has reopened ten of its twelve burned sites in a year without cutting a job

Min Bahadur Gurung grew up in a farming family in Khotang, a hill district in eastern Nepal, and started his business in May 1984 with capital raised from his wife's wedding jewellery, he told Ratopati in January. OnlineKhabar reported that the first premises was a single rented shop in Kathmandu's Naxal area. Four decades later that shop had become Bhat-Bhateni, a supermarket chain of 28 outlets, and on 9 September 2025 it became one of the most visible casualties of the Gen Z uprising. In one day, a dozen of its sites were looted and set on fire.

A year on, ten of those twelve sites are trading again, and the company says it has not cut a single job. How it managed that, and what it cost, is one of the clearest measures of how Nepali companies are repairing the physical damage of 2025, a subject we examined in our account of the uprising's cost to business.

One day in September

Before the unrest the chain handled about Rs 105m, roughly $680,000, in transactions a day, The Kathmandu Post reported. OnlineKhabar put annual turnover at about Rs 39bn, around $250m.

On 9 September, 21 of the 28 outlets were damaged, according to ShareSansar's account three days later. Twelve sites were looted, burned and left in ruins: stores in Naxal, Maharajgunj, Boudha, Koteshwor, Pokhara, Chitwan, Hetauda, Birtamod, Damak, Biratnagar and Dharan, and the company's central warehouse in Baluwatar. Nine more, at Kalanki, Thimi, Balaju, Janakpur, Butwal, Birgunj, Dhangadhi, Itahari and Bhairahawa, were vandalised and stripped of stock, ShareSansar reported. Only seven, among them Tokha, Anamnagar, Tripureshwor and Nepalgunj, escaped. In a single day, three-quarters of the network had been damaged or destroyed. Goods worth more than Rs 500m, about $3.2m, were looted, according to The Kathmandu Post.

The Kathmandu Post reported that Bhat-Bhateni was among the private businesses targeted amid anger at parties and figures associated with the CPN-UML, which then led the government, and that Gurung had drawn controversy in 2024 after donating land for the party's central office.

Estimates of the damage have moved over the year. The company reported losses of more than Rs 11bn, about $71m, and filed an insurance claim of more than Rs 11bn covering 20 stores, including the twelve that were destroyed, The Kathmandu Post reported. Ratopati put the claim at Rs 10.86bn, and in its January interview reported Gurung as saying that total losses had exceeded Rs 16bn, about $103m. In the first days after the fires the company said it would need at least two to three weeks simply to assess the damage, ShareSansar reported.

Rebuilding with the payroll intact

The first decision Gurung has described was about staff. About 5,000 of the company's more than 10,000 employees worked at the outlets and warehouse that were destroyed, The Kathmandu Post reported. None was laid off. Ratopati reported that the company kept paying salaries and the bonus for Dashain, Nepal's main annual festival, which fell soon after the fires. Gurung told Ratopati that he regarded himself as "the guardian of everyone who works here", and compared laying off staff to a parent ordering children out of the house. Panu Poudel, the chief operating officer, told Kantipur that the company had remembered its duties to the state, its employees and citizens even as it absorbed the loss. Gurung also asked the finance minister, Rameshwar Khanal, for a customs exemption on goods imported for reconstruction, and told Ratopati the minister had agreed.

Work started early. "We started work within a week," Gurung told The Kathmandu Post. Kantipur reported Gurung as saying crews worked around the clock clearing hot ash, iron and brick. The Baluwatar warehouse, which supplies the stores, was running again 70 days after the fire, and the Koteshwor store reopened after four months, according to Kantipur. Maharajgunj, Chitwan, Pokhara, Boudha, Biratnagar, Birtamod and Dharan followed, and the Tangal store in Kathmandu reopened most recently. By late September ten of the twelve sites were open again, The Kathmandu Post reported, with Damak due in December and Hetauda in January. Ratopati, reporting earlier in September, said both would follow the Dashain and Tihar festivals; Kantipur gave the Nepali months of Mangsir and Poush, which together run from mid-November to mid-January.

The bill has grown with the ambition. The Kathmandu Post and Kantipur both put the cost of rebuilding the twelve sites at about Rs 15bn, roughly $97m, while OnlineKhabar reported about Rs 14bn. Poudel, who joined the company in 2008, told Ratopati that spending ran 20% to 30% above the damage estimate because the company upgraded systems and stock rather than restoring what had been there. Poudel told OnlineKhabar that the support of tens of thousands of employees and millions of customers had made the rebuild possible.

A bigger chain than before

The company is not simply restoring what it had. In August it began keeping its Radhe Radhe outlet in Bhaktapur, just east of Kathmandu, open 24 hours a day, with groceries on sale overnight, OnlineKhabar reported, and said it planned to extend round-the-clock trading to its Krishna Galli store in Patan and to Tangal. Poudel described the format to OnlineKhabar as new to Nepal.

Ratopati reported in September that the company now employs about 12,000 people, including 2,000 part-time positions created for students, and has four new projects due to open this fiscal year or next: Lekhnath in Pokhara, Tandi in Chitwan, and Satdobato and Bhainsepati in the Kathmandu Valley. Gurung told Ratopati he wants the company eventually to employ at least 50,000 young Nepalis. Its trading over this year's Dashain season, the first with most of the network rebuilt, will show how far shoppers have returned; we have looked at the wider picture of festival spending this year.

What to watch

The two remaining stores are the immediate milestones: Damak in December and Hetauda in January, on the timetable reported by The Kathmandu Post. The second is money, and how quickly insurers settle, an issue we examined across the private sector in September. No published report says how much of the insurance claim has been paid, or how the rest of the rebuild is being financed. The third is trading: before the fires, the chain handled about Rs 105m a day. Whether a larger, refitted network returns to that figure will show whether the year of rebuilding has paid for itself.