Every large organisation carries within it a kind of gravity that pulls thinking downward. Not through malice — the people are not lazy or unintelligent. It is simply that the day-to-day weight of operations, targets, complaints and small problems fills the available space, and the larger picture gets crowded out. This is not a Su-Kam problem. It is a human organisation problem.
What made Su-Kam unusual was that it had someone who understood this gravity and worked — deliberately, sometimes exhaustingly — against it. Kunwer Sachdev's job — one of his jobs, beyond the engineering and the product and the finances — was to keep his people pointed at a horizon they could not yet see. To describe a destination clearly enough that the organisation would begin, almost unconsciously, to move toward it. This required a willingness to make large statements that would not look obviously achievable on the day they were made.
The China statement was one of those.
"You do not always end up where you aimed. You often end up somewhere the aiming made possible."
— Observed across years of working with Kunwer Sachdev
The China Bite
To understand what it meant to say we will export to China inside an Indian manufacturing company in the 2000s and early 2010s, you have to understand what "China" meant to Indian industry at that moment. It was not simply a country. It was a condition. A diagnosis. Cheap, fast, scalable, state-backed manufacturing arriving on Indian shelves in every category — undercutting domestic producers on price at a speed that no planning cycle could anticipate. The word in every boardroom, every trade association, every industry gathering was some version of the same sentence: you cannot compete with China.
This was the general atmosphere. This was the thing everyone believed.
Meanwhile, Su-Kam was already selling in Africa. And in the Middle East. And in Nepal. And in Sri Lanka. And in Afghanistan.
Su-Kam participated in China and Hong Kong exhibitions — taking the product to the world's most demanding buyers. AI illustration based on documented events.
China Exhibitions. Hong Kong. Samples to Russia.
The China target was not merely rhetoric. Kunwer saw to it that the organisation acted on it. Su-Kam participated in exhibitions in China. The team prepared and went to Hong Kong trade exhibitions — which were, in that era, one of the primary windows into Chinese commercial networks for international suppliers. Samples were prepared and sent to potential customers. Conversations were held. The organisation did the work of someone who actually intended to sell into that market, not the work of someone performing ambition for internal consumption.
The ambition extended further still. Samples were sent to Russia and other Eastern European countries. A separate team was assembled specifically for international export development — people whose job was to push into markets that the rest of the industry was not even looking at. These were not gestures. They were operational commitments backed by budget and personnel.
The CE Mark — Europe, China and Beyond
The CE mark opened conversations in China, Russia and Eastern Europe. It was a quality signal built for a global audience.
Underpinning all of this was a decision Kunwer had taken earlier than most of his peers: pursuing the CE mark — the European quality certification. This was not pursued because Europe was the obvious next market. It was pursued because Kunwer understood something structural: international certification is a key that opens multiple doors simultaneously.
The discipline of building a product to European standard produced documentation, testing rigour, and engineering specifications that mattered equally in Chinese trade conversations, Russian procurement discussions, and African markets where buyers had learned that international marks carry real quality information. It was not a European strategy. It was a global quality strategy that happened to start with Europe's standard. The CE mark was the passport that made every other conversation possible.
None of It Materialised — and That Is the Honest Part
The chronicler will say this plainly: the China export did not happen at any meaningful commercial scale. Russia did not open up. The separate export team built for those markets did not produce the results that were imagined. The samples went; the relationships were pursued; the exhibitions were attended. The market did not respond the way Africa had, or the Gulf, or Nepal.
This is worth saying without softening, because the Su-Kam story is sometimes told as a linear ascent followed by a single dramatic fall. The reality was more textured. There were ideas that worked and ideas that did not. There were markets that opened and markets that stayed shut. Kunwer drove his organisation toward difficult targets with genuine conviction — and sometimes that conviction produced extraordinary results, and sometimes it produced well-executed campaigns that went nowhere.
"He always thought big and drove people around it. Sometimes successful, sometimes failure."
— The chronicler, reflecting on years alongside Kunwer Sachdev
The Brand That Beat China Where It Mattered
Su-Kam's solar products lighting villages across Africa — the outcome of an organisation built to aim far. AI illustration based on documented programmes.
What Su-Kam had, in Africa and the Middle East and across South and Southeast Asia, was the thing Kunwer had been quietly building since the early 2000s: an engineering culture that treated quality as non-negotiable, and a leadership culture that treated "too ambitious" as a category error. In countries where power cuts were not occasional inconveniences but daily realities, Su-Kam was adjudged the most reliable inverter brand in Africa — not by its own marketing department, but by an external assessment.
On the same shelves where Chinese products were also available. Often cheaper. Often more aggressively distributed. Su-Kam held its ground on quality and reputation in some of the world's most demanding and logistically complex markets. The company lit up villages across sub-Saharan Africa and provided backup power to businesses across the Gulf. All of this while Chinese products had every structural advantage: lower cost base, larger scale, longer export experience, state support for overseas market development.
The Theory of the Impossible Target
Kunwer came to understand more explicitly as time went on — and later read it confirmed in the language of positive thinking and visualisation — the relationship between a goal held clearly in imagination and the actions it quietly generates. Telling a team to aim at China produced a different company than telling a team to aim at domestic market share alone. A team aiming at China builds differently. It quality-checks differently. It thinks about what a buyer who has never met you will need to see before committing.
The people who worked at Su-Kam in those years absorbed that way of working. Not all of them knew they were absorbing it. That is usually how the best management works. The Su-vastika that Kunwer founded after Su-Kam's insolvency is filing patents at a pace that tells you he has not changed his theory of the market. The category has changed — lithium batteries, BESS, solar-integrated storage — but the underlying conviction is identical.
He did not always get where he said he was going. He consistently got somewhere worth being.
From the Archive — Related Coverage
- Su-Kam Adjudged Africa's Most Reliable Inverter Brand
- Su-Kam's Impact on Lighting Up Africa
- Su-Kam Gets CE Mark
- Su-Kam to Export Inverters to China
- "We Serve Global Markets With Local Knowledge" — Kunwer Sachdev
- BSF Posts at Indo-Pak Border Powered by Su-Kam Solar Energy
By a former associate of Kunwer Sachdev
Contact the chronicler: write@invertermanofindia.com