The Industry That Didn’t Know It Could Export
When Kunwer Sachdev began thinking seriously about exports in 2003, the prevailing assumption in Indian manufacturing was clear and deeply held: India exported garments, handicrafts, and software. It did not export electronics. That was Europe, Japan, and increasingly China. The idea that an Indian inverter manufacturer could build an international distribution network was, in the polite estimation of the industry, eccentric.
India at that point was importing most of its electronics. The notion that a company from Gurugram could compete on quality and brand with international manufacturers in markets across Africa and Southeast Asia — countries where power cuts were more severe and more frequent than anything India faced — was not a serious business conversation.
Kunwer decided to have it anyway.
Sri Lanka First — With the Wrong Papers
The first export shipment went to Sri Lanka in 2003. The documentation was wrong. Nobody at Su-Kam had ever exported inverters before, so nobody quite knew what the correct paperwork looked like. The shipping team, working from the standard inverter department process, produced documents that were technically incorrect for an export consignment.
The shipment got through anyway — more by goodwill and relationship than by process. But it was a signal. If Su-Kam was going to export seriously, it needed people who understood what exporting actually required: export documentation, foreign exchange regulations, customs classifications, letters of credit, packaging standards for long-distance shipping. None of that existed yet.
Kunwer filed the lesson and moved on to the larger opportunity.
The Inverter in the Luggage
Nigeria was the real test. He flew to Lagos himself, carrying an inverter in his hand luggage as a demonstration unit. It was confiscated at the airport.
This was not entirely unexpected — customs officials at Lagos Airport in that era were, by common agreement, a law unto themselves. What followed was a negotiation that lasted long enough to miss the connection he’d planned. The inverter was eventually released, but the experience was, as he would later put it, “a very different kind of customs education from the Hong Kong spectrum analyser episode.”
Once in Lagos, he found his contact — a businessman with some position in the local trading ecosystem — and demonstrated the inverter connected to a car battery. In a city that experienced power cuts for eight to twelve hours a day, the reaction was immediate. The man understood exactly what he was looking at. He bought the unit, installed it that week, and called back asking for more.
There was no container-ready order. There was no formal distribution agreement. There was one man, one inverter, a car battery, and a Lagos home with no power. That was how it started.
Building the 70-Country Network
What followed over the next five years was methodical work that did not look methodical from the outside. Kunwer personally visited Nigeria multiple times, travelling with the first distributor through four states — planes that boarded like city buses, roads that could humble a truck driver, a level of hospitality from local businesspeople that surprised him consistently.
He then replicated the model: identify a serious single distributor per country, go there in person, spend time understanding the local grid conditions, the voltage variations, the ambient temperatures, the battery availability, the service infrastructure. Su-Kam products had to work differently in Lagos than in Delhi — not because the electronics changed, but because the use patterns did.
The first major lesson of exporting was about service. When a product failed in India, a dealer could return it. When a product failed in Nigeria or Kenya, it could not be shipped back. The brand’s reputation in that country rested entirely on whether the local team could fix it, or whether the distributor lost confidence and moved to a competitor. After too many early failures, Kunwer began posting Su-Kam service engineers in-country — people who stayed for extended periods, trained local teams, handled complex repairs, and fed technical intelligence back to Gurugram.
This was expensive and logistically demanding. It was also the only thing that worked.
What India Could Not Imagine
By 2008, Su-Kam products were shipping to over seventy countries. The export team, initially a handful of people with service backgrounds, had grown into a structured division with presence in Africa, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and South America. International trade exhibitions became annual fixtures — first attended by Kunwer himself, later led by the export head he had trained from within.
The quality standards that exporting demanded also improved the domestic product. Packaging that survived sea freight to Lagos could certainly survive road transport to Rajasthan. Documentation disciplines built for foreign exchange compliance made Su-Kam’s domestic paperwork more rigorous. The customers in seventy countries, many of them in conditions far more demanding than Indian cities, were the most brutal product testers the company had.
India’s inverter industry followed. The companies that exported in the decade after Su-Kam did so into a market that Su-Kam had already opened, along distribution channels that Su-Kam had already built, to customers who already knew what an Indian inverter was because of what Su-Kam had placed in their hands first.
Kunwer kept a photograph from that first Lagos trip for years. One inverter. One car battery. A window going dark outside. A room staying lit.
That was the export business, at its beginning.