Igniting the power back-up industry

Business India — The Magazine of the Corporate World — on how Kunwer Sachdev and Su-Kam ignited India’s power back-up industry, turning an unbranded workshop trade into a national category.

Business India, one of the country’s oldest business magazines, features Kunwer Sachdev and Su-Kam Power Systems in a story titled ‘Igniting the power back-up industry’ — a headline that captures exactly what he actually did to the sector.

Before Su-Kam — a workshop trade

Before Su-Kam, home inverters in India were essentially a cottage industry: unbranded, unreliable, and sold with no service safety net. Households bought them because they had to, and lived with whatever quality showed up. There was no design language, no warranty story worth trusting, and no serious R&D spend anywhere in the category.

What Sachdev did differently

Sachdev built Su-Kam around three things Business India’s corporate readership would recognise instantly: engineering-led product design, brand-led distribution, and R&D investment that quietly outgrew the rest of the industry. Then he industrialised it — four state-of-the-art plants, a large Baddi facility, and a channel network that eventually stretched across 90+ countries.

“Igniting the power back-up industry.”— Business India, on Kunwer Sachdev & Su-Kam

Why the headline stuck

The Business India headline still describes the actual outcome. Su-Kam’s scale, its 120+ patents, its export presence, and its shift into solar all did the same thing: they legitimised power-backup as an industry rather than a trade — and made it possible for Indian buyers to treat ‘power backup’ as a proper branded purchase decision instead of a plumbing repair.