BWDisrupt Sujata Sangwan sits down with Kunwer Sachdev — Su-Kam is now in 90 countries with 40,000 dealers, and the founder next ambition is bigger than the last: green solar in every Indian home.
BWDisrupt Sujata Sangwan interviews Kunwer Sachdev, CEO & MD of Su-Kam Power Systems — India largest power-solutions company at the time, with 200+ products, 100+ patents on record, presence in 90 countries and, per a Bridge to India report, the biggest share of India residential solar market. The piece is a founder-driven guided tour of how Su-Kam got here, and where it is trying to take Indian solar next.
Idea generation — a broken home inverter
Sachdev origin story, told to BWDisrupt, is disarmingly ordinary. His own home inverter kept breaking down and he was tired of calling electricians. One day he simply took it apart to see what was wrong. What he found — “sub-standard material and poor technology in Indian inverters” — convinced him to leave his cable-TV business and go after the “huge untapped potential of power-backup products in the Indian market.”
A stack of firsts
Su-Kam list of firsts — as Sachdev walks Sangwan through it — is unusually long. First Indian company to set up an in-house R&D facility to develop indigenous power-electronics technology. First Indian maker of sine-wave inverters. First manufacturer of plastic-body home UPS units. The company coined the term “Home UPS” by combining UPS and inverter behaviour into one product. In 2004 it built a 100 kVA inverter capable of replacing a generator. And more recently, it had launched what it billed as the world first touchscreen solar inverter.
“We aim to take green solar energy to each and every home in India.”— Kunwer Sachdev, CEO & MD, Su-Kam • BWDisrupt, 10 August 2016
Traction — 40,000 dealers, 90 countries, and a made-in-India moat
By 2016 Su-Kam dealer network had grown to 40,000 dealers across 90 countries. Sachdev pitch for why the international expansion worked is characteristically blunt: African and South-East Asian countries face problems similar to India, and “a 100 per cent Made-in-India company captured Indian and foreign markets in such a way that China could not get successful in this area.”
Competition — almost a non-topic
Asked about competitors in the traditional way, Sachdev refuses the frame. “We have never really bothered ourselves with our competitors and we continue to do that,” he tells BWDisrupt. “We only focus on making ourselves better.” It is a very Su-Kam answer — product-first, category-obsessive, indifferent to comparison.
Challenges — talent, and a customer who does not know power electronics
The early obstacles Sachdev names are the ones every hardware founder recognises — hiring and retaining good people, and setting the business up at all. But the deeper problem, he tells Sangwan, is the customer side: “the consumers lack knowledge about power electronics.” Su-Kam answer was educational content and DIY videos. Sachdev flags one small win: a young boy from Gujarat who converted his existing inverter and battery into a solar system after watching one of Su-Kam tutorials.
Future — hybrid solar and every Indian home
Sachdev closes the interview on where the company is headed. India first hybrid solar inverter. Touchscreen solar off-grid inverters. Remote monitoring on the entire product line. All in service of a very ambitious one-line goal: to take green solar energy to every Indian home. That last line, in mid-2016, is the sentence BWDisrupt made the headline — and the sentence Su-Kam next few years would try, product by product, to prove.
Su-Kam Aims to Take Green Solar Energy to Each and Every Home in India — BWDisrupt →