Kushal Desai, CMD, Apar Industries | The Spotlight

ELI5/TLDR

Apar Industries makes three boring-sounding things that the modern world cannot run without: the overhead wires that carry electricity across the country, the oil that keeps transformers from cooking themselves, and the cables that wire up everything from your house to nuclear submarines. Kushal Desai, the third-generation boss, explains how a family of engineers turned a 1958 company into a global player by owning its own technology rather than buying it. The throughline: stay focused on a few things, do them better than the Japanese and Koreans, and treat each product less as a commodity and more as a custom solution to a customer’s problem.

The Full Story

A company built by engineers, not salesmen

Apar’s three businesses — overhead conductors, specialty oils (mostly transformer oil), and wires and cables — are all, as Desai puts it, “building blocks essentially for infrastructure and particularly power infrastructure.” Every one of them touches electricity.

The interesting bit is who has run the place. The grandfather who founded it held a mechanical and electrical engineering degree. The father, Dr. N.D. Desai, was a PhD in electrical engineering. Kushal is the third generation. This matters because the technology in these products is genuinely hard to come by:

“Our main competition is complete out of Japan, Korea, United States, especially at the high end of the spectrum, or from the Middle East where they’ve paid tons of money to get the technology.”

So Apar built rather than bought. Each business has its own R&D centre, all approved by India’s Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, and crucially Apar owns the intellectual property. The point of owning your own IP is freedom: “The moment you buy technology it comes with strings attached” — restrictions on which markets you can sell into. Own it, and you can sell anywhere.

There’s a family legend woven in: Dr. Desai, during his PhD at Penn, was one of roughly 150 engineers working on the trajectory mathematics for getting Apollo to the moon and back. It was apparently so math-heavy and time-pressured that he finished his PhD in eighteen months instead of the usual four years. Take it as told; it’s a nice story regardless.

How a company from India wins contracts abroad

Desai’s framing of global competition is refreshingly plain. Customers everywhere want products that are “better, faster, and competitive” — and he’s careful to say competitive, not cheapest. In developed markets the buyer cares about timely delivery, reliability, and getting the product right to spec, because the cost of a failure is enormous.

“Unlike in India where there is too much emphasis on whoever is the cheapest… in a lot of developed markets other aspects are given significant emphasis.”

This is where reputation and track record do the heavy lifting. He’s candid about the starting point: before 2000, an email or brochure stamped “from India” got deleted or binned outright, because the country carried a stigma around quality and ethics. Software companies (Infosys, TCS) cracked that perception in the late ’90s; Desai argues firms like Apar were quietly running a parallel track on the industrial side.

Why scale is not optional

Scale, in Apar’s world, isn’t about ego — it’s the thing that lets you afford to compete. The best manufacturing equipment comes with large output, so if you can’t sell that volume, you’re stuck. And you can’t fix it by slashing price, because “the waterfall in terms of the profitability just isn’t in place to keep the business healthy.”

Scale also funds technology. Desai makes a striking claim: in his 34 years, the technology improvement in Apar’s products over the last decade exceeds what happened in the previous fifty or sixty years. We hear endlessly about software and AI; heavy industry has been quietly transforming too.

From products to solutions — the real business shift

The most interesting strategic theme is the move from selling individual products to selling complete solutions. A few examples:

Anushakti house wire. A consumer-facing cable (the unusual B2C push, with actor Sonu Sood as brand ambassador) built on the same polymer technology Apar uses for nuclear plants, submarines and locomotives. The trick is an electron beam — essentially a small particle accelerator — that fires electrons at the polymer and “cross-links” it, locking in its final properties. The result: it resists melting (so it shrugs off short circuits), carries 50% more power than conventional wire, and carries a 50-year life guarantee. The pitch is foresight — you don’t know if you’ll plug a robot into that socket in ten years, so over-build once.

HTLS conductors (high-efficiency, or “high-temperature low-sag”). Cities like Mumbai have power demand rising 5–7% a year as buses, taxis and metros go electric, but there’s no room to build new transmission towers. So Apar re-conductors the existing towers with a wire that carries far more current without sagging dangerously. Desai invokes the theory of constraints: sit with the utility, take their budget, their existing tower structure, the sag they can tolerate, the power they need to move, and design a conductor that fits all of it — anywhere from a 15% to a 300% capacity uplift.

EV charging harnesses. Not just a cable, but the finished assembly — wire plus connectors on both ends — sold as one part to charger makers.

The logic: solving a problem is worth more than selling a commodity. As Desai puts it, you’re “fundamentally playing the role of a doctor.” This requires getting embedded with customers early — what he calls KYC, know your customer — so they bring you into their design process as a strategic partner rather than a vendor.

Quality you can’t test your way to

Because Apar makes thousands of kilometres of cable and conductor a day, you literally cannot test every metre. So quality has to be built into the process, not inspected at the end. They run the standard ladder — 5S and Kaizen at the floor level, then Six Sigma (fewer than 3.4 defects per million opportunities) across the operation. Industry 4.0 sensors track critical quality parameters 24/7 and dashboard any drift out of spec. The reason it all matters: these products go into remote locations and mission-critical systems that may sit unused for thirty years and then be needed in an emergency. There’s “very little margin for error.”

The renewables and nuclear picture

Apar plays across the entire chain once power is generated — string cables connecting solar panels (it’s the country’s largest producer), cables to inverters and substations, transformers, the conductors for transmission, the special cable that runs up a windmill tower, and instrumentation-and-control cables for nuclear plants (one of the largest suppliers into “the nuclear silos”).

Desai’s energy reasoning is sober. Solar produces meaningfully only about five hours a day — roughly 10am to 3pm even in sunny India. Wind is complementary (stronger at night and in the monsoon) but neither runs 24/7. So you still need base load: nuclear, which can run continuously and be dialled up and down, and hydro. He sidesteps the “which is best” framing — with the climate situation, “there’s no choice, better or not better, you’ve got to go down this path.” The next frontier he flags is storage — batteries, hydrogen — though he notes that’s “a totally different technology.”

Focus as the whole philosophy

Desai keeps returning to focus. Indian firms once spread themselves thin because an industrial license was effectively a license to print money in any sector. Post-liberalisation, domain expertise is what wins, so Apar stays in three businesses with long runways rather than ten. He cites the Warren Buffett / Bill Gates story — both, asked separately what separates good leaders from the best, said the same word: focus. With salaries, equipment and (now) money all expensive, “resource allocation is probably one of the most important things for a business leader to do.”

What he learned from his father

The closing note is about Dr. N.D. Desai — a Vedantic scholar and follower of the Bhagavad Gita who, his son says, balanced spirituality and business as interconnected rather than opposed. The practical translation: if you accept you’re only temporary, you focus on building an institution and a culture that outlasts you. And on risk — “luck favours the brave” — meaning once you’ve genuinely convinced yourself a path is right through study, you take the calculated risk and don’t flinch. He also describes his father as deeply intuitive, but only after exhaustive Scholastic study; and as someone who played “the infinite game,” willing to invest on a long horizon toward goals that take years to pay off.

Key Takeaways

Apar Industries (founded 1958, revenues north of ₹14,000 crore) has three verticals: overhead transmission conductors, specialty oils (chiefly transformer oil), and wires & cables — all tied to power infrastructure.
Owning your own IP gives you market freedom; bought technology comes with geographic “strings attached” restricting where you can sell.
In developed markets, buyers weight reliability, on-time delivery and to-spec quality heavily — not just price — because the cost of failure is high. India’s emphasis on “cheapest” is an outlier.
Scale is what makes best-in-class equipment affordable, since that equipment comes with high output you must be able to sell. You can’t substitute price-cutting for scale without wrecking profitability.
The strategic shift is product → solution: a custom, turnkey answer to a customer’s problem (the “doctor” model) commands far more value than a commodity unit.
The “anushakti” house wire uses electron-beam cross-linking (a small particle accelerator) to make wire that resists melting, carries 50% more power, and is guaranteed for 50 years — same polymer tech used in submarines and nuclear plants.
HTLS = high-temperature low-sag conductors: they upgrade existing transmission towers to carry far more current (15% to 300% more) without new right-of-way — critical for cities with no room to build.
You can’t test mass-produced cable metre by metre, so quality must be built into the process: Six Sigma (<3.4 defects per million) plus Industry 4.0 real-time monitoring.
Solar generates meaningfully only ~5 hours/day; wind is complementary but neither is base load. Nuclear and hydro remain necessary for round-the-clock supply. Storage (batteries, hydrogen) is the next frontier.
Apar supplies the whole post-generation chain: solar string cables (largest in India), windmill tower cable (exported), nuclear instrumentation & control cables, transformers, transmission conductors.
Focus over diversification: three businesses with long runways rather than ten shallow ones. (Buffett and Gates both named “focus” as the one differentiator of great leaders.)

Claude’s Take

This is a founder-interview softball — the host lobs, the CMD bats comfortably, and there’s zero scrutiny of margins, debt, cyclicality, raw-material exposure (transformer oil is a petroleum derivative, so crude prices matter a lot) or competitive threats. Treat it as a guided tour of how Apar wants to be understood, not as analysis.

That said, Desai is unusually substantive for the format. The product explanations are real — electron-beam cross-linking and HTLS conductors are genuine engineering, not marketing fog — and the “product to solution” and “focus” arguments are coherent and consistent with how the better industrials actually compound. The energy commentary is honest about renewables’ limits in a way that promotional CEOs usually aren’t.

The weak spots are predictable: the moon-landing anecdote is unverifiable and a bit too neat, the India-stigma narrative is self-flattering, and nothing here tells you whether the business is well-priced or well-run financially — only that it makes hard-to-replicate things in a structurally growing market. A 6: clear, informative, well above the average promotional CEO chat, but it’s a portrait the subject painted himself.

Kushal Desai, CMD, Apar Industries | The Spotlight | Krish Kothari