TOP POSITION: The Power man

Corporate Citizen’s TOP POSITION interview with Kunwer Sachdev — the founder and MD of Su-Kam Power Systems on selling pens at 15, walking away from a profitable cable-TV business, and building India’s biggest inverter brand without a technology degree.

Corporate Citizen’s ‘TOP POSITION’ profile catches Kunwer Sachdev, founder and MD of Su-Kam Power Systems, at the peak of his run — already the unrivalled force in India’s power-backup sector, still repeating the line he built the whole company on: an idea is bigger than a degree.

Selling pens at 15 — the first real business

At 15, Sachdev joined his elder brother in the pen trade — buying wholesale, cycling around Delhi selling to retailers. Small money, taxing work, but that was where entrepreneurial instinct first showed up. It was, in his own telling, the seed for everything that followed.

From cable TV to power backup — a deliberate pivot

In the 1990s, when cable TV was becoming a household necessity, Sachdev built a profitable cable-TV equipment business — directional couplers, amplifiers, modulators — teaching himself the tech by reading voraciously (school physics books included) and training his staff. Then he did the counter-intuitive thing: he saw more potential in power backup and walked away from a profitable business to jump into it. In the 1990s, power was the constant worry in every Indian home, and the market for reliable inverters was wide open.

“A true risk-taker and visionary — Kunwer Sachdev has proven that an idea is bigger than a degree.”— Corporate Citizen • TOP POSITION

The Su-Kam years — and what the interview leaves behind

Sachdev walks Corporate Citizen through the same story his readers now know well: the first 100 inverters returned by buyers, the decision to hire trained engineers with the money he did not have, the shift from an unbranded workshop trade to a national inverter brand in 90+ countries, the 120+ patents that legitimised Indian power-electronics as a category. The take-away, in his voice: back yourself, back your team, and treat every failure as a fee for the next lesson.