From a Cable Shop in Delhi to One of India’s Most Respected Brands

At its peak, Su-Kam was the brand a Delhi household, a Lagos hospital and a Rwandan school all called when the lights were going out. I built it from a ten-thousand-rupee start and a corner of my cable-TV office into India’s largest organised inverter and power-backup company — a sine-wave, plastic-body, India-designed brand exporting to more than ninety countries.

I was born in Delhi in November 1962, the son of a railway employee in Punjabi Bagh. I studied statistics at Hindu College and went on to a Bachelor of Laws from the University of Delhi [1]. By the late 1980s I was running a cable-television installation and equipment business in Delhi alongside my elder brother — a profitable, hands-on operation that taught me retail, distribution and after-sales the hard way [2].

The pivot to power began with a frustration anyone in 1990s India will recognise: chronic outages. I started experimenting with backup units inside the cable business and saw a category that was technically primitive, brand-less and hugely under-served. On 14 October 1998 we formally incorporated Su-Kam Power Systems Ltd in Delhi — the corporate registry records the date and CIN to this day [3]. The starting capital was ₹10,000. The destination was a national brand [4].

Me on the factory floor — I always ran the business from the workshop, not the boardroom.

The Products That Built the Brand

The early Su-Kam product line moved fast. The first Indian inverters were standard transformer-and-board designs in heavy metal cases. Our first real breakthrough was electronics: India’s first MOSFET-based inverter, then India’s first microcontroller-based inverter, and then — the one that mattered — India’s first DSP sine-wave inverter, which removed the buzzing in fans and tube lights that square-wave units had inflicted on every backup-powered home [5].

The Su-Kam Chic — the first plastic-body inverter in India, named Innovation of the Decade by India Today.

By the late 2000s and into the 2010s the catalogue widened in three directions at once:

The Su-Kam Brainy Touch — India’s first touchscreen solar PCU with Wi-Fi monitoring and MPPT controller.

The Category I Created

Before Su-Kam, “inverter” in India meant a heavy, square-wave box bought from an unbranded local assembler, kept under the stairs and replaced when it failed. There was no category leader, no consumer brand, no national service network. We built one.

By the mid-2000s the company was the country’s largest organised inverter manufacturer, capturing a market share that contemporary trade coverage placed at over thirty-five per cent at peak [12]. Su-Kam was also the first Indian power-solutions company to win Superbrands India recognition — an industry milestone, because the category itself had not previously been seen as branded territory [13].

A Su-Kam dealer meet — the brand was built on 25,000+ dealer partnerships across India.

The competitors who came after, including those who outlived Su-Kam itself, copied the template we wrote: brand the box, ship a sine wave, give the buyer something with a face on the carton and a service phone number on the back.

A Factory of Firsts

The operational base was Plot 54, Udyog Vihar Phase VI, Gurugram — Su-Kam’s headquarters and primary inverter plant [14] — supported at scale by a battery factory in Himachal Pradesh staffed by trained engineers and equipped for in-house testing [15].

Vertical integration was the deliberate strategy: design, electronics, plastics, batteries and software under one company umbrella, so that a sine-wave inverter, the battery it drove and the charge controller that fed it could all be engineered to work together rather than bolted into a system at the dealer’s shop floor. At its peak the company employed in the high hundreds and ran a pan-India service network [16].

The Su-Kam battery manufacturing facility in Baddi, Himachal Pradesh — vertical integration from electronics to batteries.

From India to Ninety Countries

Su-Kam’s international expansion ran parallel with its domestic growth. Independent industry coverage put export reach at more than ninety countries at peak across South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America, supported by a dealer network of more than twenty-five thousand partners [17].

Su-Kam solar street lights — deployed across Africa including ~2,000 units in Gabon’s villages of Kango, Mouila and Bitam.

The export book wasn’t the easy markets. Many deployments were in places where grid power was either unreliable, intermittent or absent. The pitch was simple in any language: a unit that ships from India, designed to handle Indian grid behaviour, that will run a household, a clinic or a classroom when nothing else will. Su-Kam representatives showed up at trade shows like Middle East Electricity year after year, and by the mid-2010s the brand was being specified into government and donor-funded electrification tenders in markets where Indian manufacturers had previously been a footnote.

Pioneering Solar in India

Su-Kam moved into solar earlier than most Indian power-electronics companies. By the early 2010s the catalogue already covered solar inverters, off-grid systems, grid-tie inverters, PWM and MPPT solar charge controllers, solar PCUs and solar lighting — aligned with the launch of the National Solar Mission and the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy‘s first phase of off-grid programs [21][22].

In a 2018 pv magazine India interview, I argued that the company was “four to five years ahead of competitors” on inverter technology, and used the conversation to position Su-Kam squarely on solar hybrid systems — Solarcon, Brainy and the touchscreen PCU [23]. I carried two informal titles by then: the inverter man of India and, increasingly, the solar man of India [24].

The Su-Kam Brainy Touch — a solar hybrid home UPS that ran households on panels and battery without a separate solar inverter.

The Recognitions

• Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year — 2011 [25]
• Bharat Shiromani Award — Government-of-India-affiliated honour for entrepreneurship and innovation [26]
• Entrepreneur of the Year — Entrepreneur India Awards, 2011 [27]
• Superbrands India — the first Indian power-solutions company so recognised [28]
• India Today — Innovation of the Decade — for the plastic-body inverter (Chic) [7]
• Connect the Dots by Rashmi Bansal — profiled as one of twenty entrepreneurs-without-an-MBA [29]

Kunwer Sachdev receiving the Bharat Shiromani Award — one of many recognitions for entrepreneurship and innovation.

Two of those recognitions matter more than the rest. The Superbrand title — awarded on the strength of consumer recall and category leadership — was the clearest external acknowledgement that an Indian power-backup company had become a household name. The India Today “Innovation of the Decade” was the clearest acknowledgement that the underlying engineering was the real story.

The Brand in New Hands

Su-Kam is no longer mine. The brand, the factories, the patents, the dealer network — all of it passed through an NCLT resolution process and into the hands of new promoters in 2022. Today the company operates under the leadership of Navraj Mittal, Ashok Kumar Gupta, Vishnu Prakash Goyal, and Rajneesh Bansal.

The new ownership has announced ambitious plans: a ₹6,000-crore revenue target over five years, a 500 MW lithium-ion battery manufacturing facility in Baddi, Himachal Pradesh, and expansion into lithium-based energy storage and solar segments. The company reported revenue of ₹317 crore in FY2024 and continues to export across Africa and other markets. The Su-Kam name is still on inverters, batteries, and solar products sold through the same dealer channels we built over two decades.

What I can say is this: the template is strong. The dealer network, the Superbrand recognition, the patent portfolio, the presence in ninety-plus countries — those were not built in a day, and they do not disappear with a change of ownership. The real test of any brand is whether it survives its founder. Su-Kam is now taking that test.