Kunwer Sachdev Success Story: From Selling Pens on Buses to Su-Kam

Six national outlets on the same story: Kunwer Sachdev — the boy who sold pens on Delhi buses and built Su-Kam into a Rs 2,300-crore inverter company.

Six outlets — DNA India, Maharashtra Times, MyNation, Divya Bhaskar, Chetna Manch and Hindi Soch — carried the same success-story arc of Kunwer Sachdev, founder of Su-Kam Power Systems: from selling pens on Delhi city buses in the late 1970s to building a Rs 2,300-crore branded inverter company that would earn him the informal title “The Inverter Man of India.”

Selling pens on buses

The image every outlet opens on is the same: a middle-class boy in late-1970s Delhi, helping his older brother sell pens and stationery — some of it on city buses — to help pay for his own education. His father was a railway clerk; family finances forced a move from a private to a government school. Getting a new shoe or shirt on a birthday, he has said in later interviews, was “a big thing.”

Statistics at Hindu College, then cable TV

He narrowly missed medical school and ended up doing Mathematical Statistics at Hindu College, then Law at Delhi University while helping his brother. In 1988, with about Rs 10,000 in seed capital, he started a cable-TV equipment company in Punjabi Bagh — teaching himself the electronics from class 9 and 10 Physics textbooks. By 1996-97 the cable business had a Gurgaon factory and roughly 50 employees.

“Knowledge for the sake of knowledge is foolish, but it is a way forward.”— Kunwer Sachdev, on the self-taught electronics that let him build Su-Kam

The 1998 inverter pivot

The pivot came in 1998 when his own home inverter kept breaking down. He took it apart, saw sub-standard PCBs, bought a branded reference unit, and asked his factory workers to reverse-engineer it. The first Su-Kam inverters shipped in 1998; by 2000 the company was manufacturing the world first plastic-body inverter after convincing GE Plastics to develop a heat-resistant resin for the job.

From Rs 10,000 to Rs 2,300 crore

Su-Kam crossed Rs 100 crore by 2004. In 2005-06 Reliance Capital and Singapore Temasek together took a 20 per cent stake for Rs 45 crore. At its peak Su-Kam touched roughly Rs 2,300 crore in revenue, exported to 90+ countries, and Sachdev had filed more than a hundred patents in power-electronics — among the highest for any Indian company in the sector.

Why the story keeps travelling

The reason six outlets keep reprinting the arc is that it is unusually complete: a lower-middle-class Delhi boy who did not go to IIT and did not have an engineering degree, taught himself the electronics, built a national brand in a category everyone considered unglamorous, and then talked openly about the mistakes as well as the wins. That combination — scale, honesty, and a workable playbook — is what the Indian business press keeps sending readers back to.