YourStory profiles Kunwer Sachdev — the “Inverter Man of India” who started Su-Kam with Rs 10,000 and turned it into the country largest inverter maker, exporting to 90 countries.
YourStory Sindhu Kashyaap profiles Kunwer Sachdev — the “Inverter Man of India” — and traces the arc from a middle-class Punjabi household in Delhi to Su-Kam, one of the country largest power-backup companies, now exporting to 90 countries. What makes the piece work is what it does not skip: the false starts, the education pivots, and the very small amount of money it began with.
Selling pens through college
The origin story YourStory retells is by now familiar but still striking. Sachdev father was a railway clerk; a squeeze on family finances forced a move from a private school to a government one. He narrowly missed the marks needed for medical school and, instead of engineering, ended up doing statistical honours at Hindu College — while helping his brother sell pens and stationery, work he stayed with full-time after graduation.
From cable-TV kit to Su-Kam
His first job, in 1988 at a cable communications company, seeded the idea for Su-Kam Communication Systems — a cable-TV accessories business he launched without any manufacturing background. He learned installation on the job, read voraciously, and eventually built manufacturing capability for cable-TV equipment in-house.
“Un-learning is more difficult than mastering learning — especially when it means accepting that an established idea may be wrong.”— Kunwer Sachdev to YourStory • 3 August 2015
The inverter pivot — and the plastic body first
The pivot to inverters came out of ordinary domestic frustration: his own house inverter kept breaking down. He investigated the market, discovered it was built out of poor-quality components, studied sophisticated Canadian models, and launched Su-Kam Power Systems in 1998. Early Su-Kam inverters were smaller and more advanced than what competitors were shipping. By 2000, Su-Kam became the first company in the world to manufacture plastic-body inverters — a shift so unusual that Sachdev had to convince GE Plastics to develop a special heat-resistant material to make it safe.
The hardest hires and the earliest cheque
YourStory does not skip the operational bits. The hardest part, Sachdev tells Kashyaap, was persuading professionals to leave secure jobs to join an unglamorous inverter startup, then managing them through years of technological experimentation. Funding was thin — he borrowed from friends and family for years, until Reliance Power finally invested in 2006.
Where he is looking next
By 2015, Su-Kam was operating across 90 countries and Sachdev was already laying out what came next: a solar-energy revolution in India, mentoring startups, and investing in solar-LED lighting companies. The YourStory piece reads, in hindsight, as the interview that captures Sachdev at the exact hinge between his inverter identity and the “Solar Man” label he would earn in the years that followed.
With Rs 10,000, this entrepreneur went on to build India largest inverter company — YourStory →