May 2004, Business Line’s Gaurav Raghuvanshi on Kunwer Sachdev’s founding decision — walking away from a profitable dish-antenna business to build reliable, affordable, presentable inverters, purely on gut feel.
Business Line’s Gaurav Raghuvanshi opens with a small, familiar scene: Kunwer Sachdev’s home inverter conks out for the nth time. He does not call the service guys. He opens the unit, tears out the parts, and decides he will build a better one himself. Two months later he has shut down a profitable dish-antenna manufacturing business and is assembling the first lot of inverters in a small unit in North-West Delhi. And that, in 1997, is how Su-Kam — India’s largest-selling inverter brand — was born.
The brief he wrote for himself
Sachdev tells Business Line his founding brief was three words long: reliable, affordable, presentable. He had already made his first million from dish antennas. Everyone around him told him not to walk into an untested business. He walked in anyway, on gut — because the gap he had personally lived with as a customer was too obvious to ignore.
The first lots didn’t sell — and the fix
The early inverters were not a runaway hit. Raghuvanshi’s piece is honest about that: the first few lots were not exactly a special sell. Sachdev’s response was the same one he would repeat over the next decade — hire real engineers, invest in R&D early, and keep improving the product until customer complaints stopped being about reliability.
“I took the plunge into an unexplored business only because I had a gut feeling that it would work out.”— Kunwer Sachdev, CEO, Su-Kam Communication Systems • Business Line, 21 May 2004
Why Business Line called him a ‘gut’ entrepreneur
The headline is not incidental. Sachdev’s trajectory — pens, cable TV, dish antennas, inverters — is a pattern of walking away from what is working the moment he sees a bigger, harder problem worth solving. Business Line frames that as gut. Twenty years later, the same instinct is how he ended up mentoring Su-vastika into lithium storage.
‘He goes with his gut’ — Business Line (The Hindu) →