The Gap in the Product Line
By 2006, Su-Kam had a product for almost every power backup need in the Indian market. Home inverters in four sizes. The Home UPS for seamless operation. Sinewave technology for sensitive appliances. High-capacity IGBT systems for commercial loads. Solar PCUs for off-grid applications.
The one segment it had not addressed was online UPS — the double-conversion technology used in data centres, hospitals, banking infrastructure, and anywhere that could not tolerate even the microseconds of switchover time that a conventional UPS required. This was a genuinely different engineering problem from anything Su-Kam had built before, and it was dominated entirely by international brands: APC, Eaton, Emerson, and a constellation of European and Israeli manufacturers whose products arrived in India as imports at import prices.
Kunwer saw the gap clearly. He also saw the complexity of trying to develop double-conversion technology entirely in-house. His solution was characteristically direct: find the best partner available and manufacture in India.
The Gamatronic Partnership
Gamatronic was an Israeli company with established online UPS technology and international distribution. The connection — made, as many of Kunwer’s best connections were, through the international exhibition circuit — led to a joint manufacturing arrangement: Gamatronic’s double-conversion technology, Su-Kam’s manufacturing capability and Indian market relationships, production happening on Indian soil for the first time in this category.
The partnership was a genuine engineering achievement. Su-Kam’s team, trained on inverter and Home UPS manufacturing, had to absorb a significantly more complex production process. Online UPS double-conversion technology runs the load through rectifier-to-inverter conversion continuously — not just on switchover — which means the electronics are always working, always managing, always in a higher state of heat and stress than a conventional standby design. The quality standards required were correspondingly higher.
They got it done. Su-Kam became the first Indian inverter manufacturer to produce a double-conversion online UPS domestically — a distinction that mattered enormously to the segment of buyers who required certified performance documentation.
The Market That Moved
The commercial story was more complicated.
The online UPS market in India was not, in 2006, a volume market. It was a specification market — buyers who needed online UPS were buyers who understood the technical difference and had it written into their procurement requirements. These buyers were already in relationships with the international brands, which had decades of installation track records and global service networks.
Breaking into those relationships required either a significant price advantage or a compelling performance story. Su-Kam had some of both, but not enough of either, quickly enough.
Meanwhile, the technology landscape was shifting. The market was beginning to move toward high-frequency online UPS systems — lighter, more efficient, more compact than the traditional galvanic-isolation double-conversion design. The technology Gamatronic had provided was solid and reliable, but it was the older technology. The lighter high-frequency designs being brought in by international competitors carried advantages that Su-Kam’s partnership did not yet address.
“We kept selling in small numbers,” Kunwer would note later. “We could have improved the technology as per the changing times, but we were not able to do the same.”
What the Online UPS Period Built
The partnership with Gamatronic did not produce a market transformation. It produced something more durable: a capability.
The Su-Kam engineers who worked through the double-conversion production process emerged with a depth of understanding of power conversion electronics that they had not had before. The quality disciplines imposed by the online UPS technology — tighter tolerances, more rigorous burn-in testing, better thermal management — influenced the standards applied to products that did reach volume. The Battery Management System work, the high-capacity IGBT inverters, the solar PCU development — all of them benefited from the organisational learning that the Gamatronic years had deposited.
This was a pattern Kunwer recognised by then. A product that failed commercially rarely failed completely — it tended to fail in its primary market while succeeding in the secondary market of internal knowledge. The double-conversion experience was one version of it. The FairyQueen packaging disaster was another. The failed digital compression set-top box from the Canadian startup in the 1990s was perhaps the most foundational.
Each expensive detour had made the next right road easier to walk.
The online UPS business ran at modest volumes for several years. The engineers who built it went on to design the products that the company would become famous for. The Israeli partnership — like the American exhibition trips, like the Canadian startup, like the Hong Kong customs ordeal — was another line in the education of a company that learned almost everything the hard way, and forgot almost nothing it had learned.