By a former associate of Kunwer Sachdev
When people ask what built Su-Kam, they expect an answer about technology or distribution or Kunwer’s restless mind. The full answer, though, involves dormitories in Hong Kong, a confiscated piece of equipment sitting in a customs warehouse, and a decision to spend money on testing gear that most people his age were spending on houses.
Kunwer started attending trade exhibitions in the early 1990s when Su-Kam was still a small cable TV systems company with more ambition than cash. The electronics industry was transforming fast — satellite television, cable networks, signal processing — and he understood instinctively that the only way to stay ahead of it was to go where the future was being shown. That meant Hong Kong. That meant Singapore. That meant spending money he barely had to get on a plane and walk trade floors where everyone else was already well-funded and well-connected.
He went anyway. He stayed in dormitories to save money. He walked everywhere rather than take taxis. He carried catalogues back in his cabin baggage because checked luggage cost more. These were not romantic sacrifices — they were pragmatic calculations made by a young entrepreneur who needed knowledge more than comfort and who had the specific kind of stubbornness that allows a person to sit in a shared dormitory room while surrounded by German and Japanese exhibitors in five-star hotels and feel, genuinely, like the most motivated person in the building.
The Analyser
At a Hong Kong exhibition in 1992, he found what he had been looking for: a Spectrum Analyser, a piece of precision testing equipment essential for cable TV work, being offered at a price he could not refuse. A Spectrum Analyser measures and displays the amplitude of signals across a range of frequencies. For anyone building and testing cable TV systems, it was not optional equipment — it was the difference between guessing and knowing. In India, getting one through official channels was nearly impossible. The taxes were punitive. The import procedures were Byzantine. The equipment simply was not available.
He bought it. The money was arranged through channels that were technically legal but required creative navigation of India’s foreign exchange restrictions — a common reality of doing business in early-1990s India, before liberalisation opened the floodgates.
He brought it to Delhi. And then Indian customs took it.
Three Months in a Warehouse
The duty on the analyser was 250 percent. The customs officials questioned how he had obtained foreign currency. A criminal case could have been registered against him — not because he had done anything wrong in spirit, but because the rules governing foreign exchange were so complex and so poorly understood that importing anything without a professional customs agent was essentially asking for trouble.
The Spectrum Analyser sat in a customs warehouse for three months.
He got it out eventually. It took a clearing agent, considerable paperwork, and patience that would have broken most people. The lesson he took from this was not bitterness toward the system — though that would have been understandable — but a granular, practical education in how India actually worked. The relationship between importers and customs agents. The difference between what the law said and how it was administered. The hidden infrastructure that made commerce possible for those who understood it.
The Second Analyser
What happened next is the part of the story that matters most.
Having gone through the customs ordeal with the first instrument, having lost months and money and nerves to the process, Kunwer decided to buy a second Spectrum Analyser. A better one. The Anritsu model — professional grade, built for precision manufacturing and R&D work, and priced at roughly twenty lakh rupees.
In 1992, twenty lakh rupees could buy a house.
He bought the Anritsu analyser.
The people around him — those who knew what the money could otherwise have bought — thought this was either visionary or reckless or both. He saw it differently. The equipment was not an expense; it was infrastructure. If you were going to build things that worked, you needed to know whether they worked. You needed measurement. You needed the ability to test, to fail, to understand why, and to improve. Without that, you were just assembling components and hoping.
This logic — investing in the tools of verification before the tools of production — would define how Su-Kam’s research and development culture was built over the following decade. He brought in engineers, but he hired people with potential rather than pedigree, because pedigree was expensive and potential was teachable. He created an environment where the equipment was there, the testing was done, and the learning happened collectively. The Anritsu analyser became the anchor of a small R&D lab that would eventually produce some of the most significant power electronics innovations in Indian manufacturing history.
What the Exhibitions Did
Looking back, the trade show years did something that money and formal education could not have replicated. They gave Kunwer a map of where the world was going. He saw EchoStar satellite receivers from the United States and understood that India’s television infrastructure was years behind but accelerating. He saw cable network components from Japanese manufacturers and understood what his own manufacturing needed to aim for. He saw the gap between what Indian consumers were being sold and what was technically possible, and that gap became the space he built his company inside.
He also formed relationships — with suppliers, with distributors, with engineers at other companies who would later become partners or references or, occasionally, competitors. The networks built on those trade floors were not formal arrangements; they were conversations had over product demonstrations, business cards exchanged in corridors, slow accumulations of trust between people who kept meeting in the same places because they were all chasing the same things.
He once said he could count on one hand the number of people in his position who were attending those exhibitions in those years. Not because others lacked the ambition, but because they lacked the particular combination of frugality and stubbornness that allowed you to sleep in a dormitory, walk the trade floor all day, carry catalogues home in your hand luggage, and think: one day I will exhibit here.
He did, eventually, exhibit there.
By a former associate of Kunwer Sachdev