His journey from creating a revolutionary product to losing his company and rebuilding his career is a story of resilience.
DNA India frames the life of Kunwer Sachdev as a full-circle story: the man who built one of the country’s most successful power-backup companies, watched it slip away, and came back to start again. It is a portrait of both the heights an Indian entrepreneur can reach and how quickly they can be lost — and why Sachdev is still standing.
The rise of an inverter empire
Sachdev is popularly known as the “Inverter Man of India,” and the title was hard-earned. With a background in mathematical statistics and law rather than engineering, he set up Su-Kam Power Systems in the late 1990s and turned a chaotic, unbranded inverter trade into a professional consumer industry. Under his leadership the company filed more than a hundred patents, launched the world’s first plastic-body inverter, and carried Indian-made power-backup products into the Middle East, Africa and South Asia — making Su-Kam a household name at home and abroad.
The one mistake
As DNA’s headline underlines, a single misstep can undo decades of work. The 26-year-old company that had freed Indian households from the misery of power cuts came apart, and the brand Sachdev had made synonymous with reliable backup power slipped out of his hands. It is the part of the story every entrepreneur fears: that success, however hard-won, is never guaranteed to last.
“Success is never permanent, and failure is never final.”
Rebuilding from the ground up
What makes the DNA profile a story of resilience rather than ruin is what came next. Instead of retreating, Sachdev channelled the same instincts that had built Su-Kam into a new venture, Su-vastika — a technology-driven power-solutions company focused on sustainable, green energy storage. The lesson he offers is simple but hard-won: a brand can be taken away, but the skills, relationships and mindset that created it stay with you.
Why the story resonates
Sachdev’s arc has become a fixture of Indian business journalism precisely because it refuses the neat, upward-only shape of most success stories. He rose from very ordinary beginnings, reached the top of an industry he effectively modernised, lost it, and began again — and it is that willingness to start over, publicly and at scale, that DNA holds up as the real measure of the man.