History
The foundation of PRIMLAKS can be traced back to Kodumal Hemnani and his loving wife Radhibai. Kodumal was a devoted husband who believed in honesty, hard work and family. The couple resided in Hyderabad Sindh where Kodumal owned three textile shops and was President of the Hyderabad Cloth Merchants Association.
Life was good and Kodumal could not have expected that he would have to flee Hyderabad following the partition of India in 1947. He took the decision overnight to send his family from Sindh, Pakistan to Jodhpur, India in 1949 after witnessing firsthand the escalating community violence. Kodumal left behind everything he knew and with the help of Ishmael, a wood trader he befriended on the train to Jodhpur, Kodumal recommenced business as a coal merchant.
By 1955 his family had grown to ten children, three daughters and seven sons. With so many mouths to feed the elder brothers were sent to work at an early age in Japan, Hong Kong and Chile. On return of his eldest sons in 1963, visionary Kodumal seeded the idea of opening a company in their minds. He believed that if the elder brothers started a company this would create an opportunity for the younger ones to join at a later date and that working together they stood a better chance of success.
The first order of business Kodumal put on the table was for his family to come up with a name for the new company. The family decided to take the first initials of every living relative and used a scrabble board to create the new company name. After a few hours of reordering the letters they formed the name PRIMLAKS.
Kodumal Hemnani (centre) with his 7 sons, the founders of PRIMLAKS
The first PRIMLAKS Company was established five years later in 1968 in Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo trading in general merchandise, electronics and textiles. Three years later PRIMLAKS commenced business in Lagos, Nigeria on October 1, 1971. That same year the company also started doing business in Brazil.
As more family members and other professionals joined the business, their varying skills and personalities complimented each other and they formed a dream team. The brothers then opened financing offices in London, Hong Kong and Miami to compliment the manufacturing operations in Nigeria, India and Brazil and thus began the rise of PRIMLAKS into a diversified group with companies spanning different industries around the globe. The rest, as they say, is history.
