Money Today profiles Kunwer Sachdev — the “dark horse” who turned a Rs 10,000 cable-TV startup into a Rs 45-crore Reliance-and-Temasek-backed inverter major, and never once thought about becoming anything but a businessman.
Money Today — the personal-finance stable-mate of Business Today — profiled Kunwer Sachdev in May 2007 as an entrepreneur who had done the unlikely thing: built a real, branded company in an industry that no one considered a “business.” The piece frames him as a dark horse of Indian entrepreneurship — a statistics graduate who never once considered a job, whose father failed ventures had taught him what not to do, and who turned Rs 10,000 into a Reliance-and-Temasek-backed inverter company.
Business was always on his mind
For a statistics graduate to become, in Money Today phrase, a “business technologist,” is an unusual leap. “Business was always on my mind. All through college I thought of nothing else,” Sachdev tells the magazine. He credits his father — a railway clerk who repeatedly tried and failed to start his own business — with silently motivating him to accomplish what his father could not.
A cable-TV start with Rs 10,000
His first serious venture came in 1989 — a cable-TV business set up with just Rs 10,000, alongside a techie from an earlier telecom job. The techie refused to quit his job, and Sachdev spent the first stretch running the operation single-handed: HR, finance, technology, sales. To keep the lights on, he took cabling assignments in multi-storeyed buildings and hotels with two workers, funded by client advances. His wife Gita — whom the piece describes as his bedrock — carried the household through the lean years.
“The demand was huge, players were few and we were quality conscious. We would take back all faulty products, thus reinforcing the faith of our customers.”— Kunwer Sachdev to Money Today • 4 May 2007
1997 — the inverter that would not stop breaking
Cable-TV boomed in 1991 with multi-channels; by 1997 Sachdev dish antennas and satellite receivers were selling across north India, and he had made his first million. The pivot happened when his own home inverter kept conking out. He took it apart himself, saw the poor engineering — and immediately spotted a real business in giving Indian consumers something better. The first batch of 100 inverters was a disaster and every unit was returned. Instead of quitting, he pulled in engineers from the fledgling UPS industry and focused on technological innovation, testing and retesting.
The Rs 15-lakh Gurgaon factory and the Rs 45-crore deal
In 2000, Sachdev shut down his profitable cable-TV business to set up Su-Kam first serious factory in Gurgaon — a Rs 15-lakh bet. Continuous product upgrades made the company a clear market leader. Validation arrived when Reliance and Singapore Temasek together paid Rs 45 crore for a 20 per cent stake. By the time Money Today caught up with him, Sachdev had a house in Gurgaon, a farmhouse, 21 offices, three factories and about 1,000 employees.
Reinvest, do not diversify
The closing beat of the profile is a portrait of a founder who is uninterested in the trappings of wealth. Asked about going public, he shrugs — maybe. Sachdev tells Money Today he would rather reinvest in the business than buy property, chase stocks or park money in mutual funds. He had bought life insurance, the piece notes, only because the agents were persistent. It is a very Indian version of the dark-horse entrepreneur — quiet, technically obsessed, allergic to distraction, and building a company one product at a time.