SmartCEO on how Kunwer Sachdev turned Su-Kam from a cottage-industry power-backup shop into a Rs 600 crore R&D-driven inverter major — and why he was chasing 70 per cent growth the year of the story.
SmartCEO’s September 2012 profile by S. Meera catches Su-Kam at Rs 600 crore in revenue and hunting a 70 per cent growth rate — a scale that would have been unthinkable when Kunwer Sachdev took apart his first inefficient home inverter and decided he could build a better one.
From cable TV to a broken inverter
Sachdev spent the 1980s manufacturing cable-TV equipment. The pivot came when the inverters he was using at home failed to actually keep the lights on. He opened one up, saw how much room there was for engineering, and decided to build in that gap. Su-Kam was founded in Delhi to make quality power-backup at a time when the whole category was still a cottage industry.
R&D as the compounding advantage
SmartCEO’s framing is that Sachdev’s real edge was investing early in engineering. From one research engineer in 1991, Su-Kam built a full R&D team that let it out-design the small players and out-price the imports. That R&D spend is why the company held on to a shape that everyone else in the category kept losing.
“Right from the early days of founding Su-Kam, Kunwer Sachdev realised the importance of investing in R&D to power the nation’s need for energy.”— S. Meera, SmartCEO • 1 September 2012
Rs 600 crore — and where the next 70 per cent was coming from
By the time SmartCEO ran the profile, Su-Kam had crossed Rs 600 crore in revenue and Sachdev was publicly targeting 70 per cent growth for the year. The strategy: keep engineering the reliability edge, keep pushing into new applications and geographies, and treat energy backup not as a workshop craft but as a design-led industrial product.