The Line That Held the Industry Back
The heart of every inverter is its printed circuit board. In India’s power electronics industry through the 2000s and into the early 2010s, that board was almost universally made the same way: through-hole components, hand-soldered, inspected visually, built to tolerances that had not changed substantially since the 1980s.
Through-hole PCB manufacturing had real advantages. It was forgiving — a solder joint that looked suspect could be reflowed with a handheld iron. It was familiar — every technician in every workshop across India understood it. It was repairable in the field, which mattered enormously in a country where inverters were sold into areas without formal service infrastructure.
It was also slow, labour-intensive, inconsistent at scale, and increasingly obsolete compared to what was being produced in electronics manufacturing centres abroad.
Kunwer Sachdev began paying attention to Surface Mount Device technology — where components sit directly on the board surface rather than threading through holes — in the context of the consumer electronics he was watching emerge from East Asia. Smaller. Faster to manufacture. Denser. More reliable under vibration. Better thermal performance at high component counts.
He became convinced, early, that SMD was the direction. The question was whether to be first or to wait until the transition was easier.
The Sceptics
He did not have to imagine the resistance. It arrived immediately.
The concern that spread through Su-Kam’s manufacturing floor and dealer network was specific and not unreasonable: SMD components, because of their smaller physical connection points, were widely believed to be fragile in the high-vibration, high-temperature, high-humidity conditions of Indian homes and commercial installations. An inverter lives in a cupboard or under a staircase. It gets bumped. It runs in 45-degree heat. It operates in monsoon humidity. The argument went: through-hole joints could take that punishment. SMD joints could not.
There were also practical concerns. SMD manufacturing required reflow ovens, pick-and-place machines, automated inspection equipment — capital investment significantly above what through-hole lines needed. Training was required. The supply chain for SMD components was less established in India than for through-hole equivalents.
The rumours became pronounced enough that Kunwer tracked their source. The resistance was coming from competitors who had not made the investment and preferred that Su-Kam hadn’t either. The commercial interests masquerading as technical concerns were, to anyone who had actually run component reliability tests, not the point.
The Transition
Su-Kam made the investment. The pick-and-place machines arrived. The reflow ovens were commissioned. The engineers were trained — partly internally, partly through relationships with component suppliers who had strong interests in helping the transition succeed.
The results validated what Kunwer had seen coming. SMD manufacturing produced boards with fewer manual soldering variations, higher consistency between units, better thermal management, and ultimately lower defect rates than the through-hole lines they supplemented and eventually replaced. The smaller board footprint reduced inverter size and weight. The faster production cycle reduced manufacturing cost per unit.
The reliability concerns about field conditions proved manageable. Proper conformal coating — a resin applied over the board to protect against moisture and vibration — addressed the environmental risks. Su-Kam’s service data in the years following the transition did not show the uptick in SMD-related failures that the sceptics had predicted.
“Domestic competitors initially resisted this change,” Kunwer noted. “The market eventually embraced SMD as the standard.”
What First Mover Buys You
The lag between Su-Kam’s transition and the industry’s adoption of SMD gave the company several years of manufacturing advantage that showed up in product cost, product size, and product reliability. Inverters that could be made smaller were inverters that could go into spaces the previous generation could not. The cost reduction that came with higher-volume automated assembly was cost reduction that could be passed to the customer or held as margin — both useful options in a competitive market.
The competitors who had spread the reliability rumours eventually made the transition themselves, acquiring equipment, retraining their lines, and paying the same adoption costs that Su-Kam had already absorbed years earlier.
This was the compound interest of being first. Not spectacular in any single year. Decisive over a decade.
The SMD story did not generate headlines or award ceremonies. There was no India Today innovation award for choosing the right manufacturing process before the market agreed it was right. But the engineers who had spent years refining Su-Kam’s through-hole production, and then spent years more building mastery in SMD, carried that knowledge into every company they subsequently worked for. The technical DNA of India’s power electronics manufacturing sector carries more Su-Kam influence than most industry histories acknowledge.
The boards nobody believed in became the boards that built the standard.