India’s Dirty Secret: How is the Power Crisis Paralysing India? How To Fix It? (Transcript)

You know it’s funny that Modiji in 2018 said that we have electrified all villages in India. But even today, millions of Indians still live in darkness.

India is glorified as the fourth largest economy. But even then, today our industries still face power outages. And while we want to compete with China and Germany, we are still at the mercy of oil powers and wars. Because every time oil price fluctuates, the Indian economy begins to dwindle. So we are trying everything from E20 to solar to wind to try and come out of this problem.

Now, politicians often refrain from answering tough questions. Which is why today I decided to have you guys: a new age entrepreneur, a seasoned entrepreneur and an investor who invests in the stock market and generates growth in revenue. To talk about India’s power problem and how can we solve this problem and become a beneficiary of the solution. Because as investors, we can invest in power companies and become a beneficiary. As entrepreneurs, we can solve this problem and become a beneficiary so that we can be a part of the solution and not just crib about problems.

Today, the agenda is pretty simple. We want to understand three very simple things. Number one, why is India facing a power crisis? Number two, as an investor, how can we choose companies that will benefit because of the solution that India will bring in to solve this power problem? And Ayush, from you I want to know, how can a new age entrepreneur build a million dollar business by solving India’s power problem? Because on the outset it looks like this is a game that is meant only for big players like Tata Power and Adani Power.

And sir, from you I want an overview of this problem because you’ve been in this industry for decades so that people like me and Ayush can learn from you and become a part of the solution and hopefully make a lot of money. That’s the agenda for today’s podcast. So let’s take one minute to introduce each one of you and then we can get started with the agenda of the podcast, shall we? Sir, let’s start with you.

Meet the Experts

VIVEK JAIN: Hi, thanks for having us here. So I’m an entrepreneur having my own brand called Action Tessa, which is the largest brand for MDF and particle wood in India. We are the largest and the most innovative company in the country. And my past has been with Microtech, which is solving the power problems of the country, the largest inverter manufacturer. So I’ve seen that world closely. So that’s an interesting podcast we are having today for the discussion.

And we have a family office also by the name of Arogya Capital, which we fund the right entrepreneurs. We have a framework to do it. We’ll talk about later.

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: Amazing. Arvind sir.

ARVIND KOTHARI: Hi Ganesh, thank you for having us. So Niveshaay, we founded in 2014. The whole mindset was to pick entrepreneurs which are going to change a lot of sectors. But the whole problem was that in India, all sectors which were growing fast were either in the negative list from the banking sector’s point of view of lending, or the equity investors were not that much encouraged to invest over there because of the risk.

That is where at Niveshaay, we started to take bold entrepreneur calls. And the journeys that we’ve taken with entrepreneurs like Vivekji has helped us identify companies, try to get mentors for them, try to arrange capital for them. In fact, over the years we’ve also tried to take them public all through our efforts. And that is where we want to keep on doing that journey again and again in sectors which are growing, for sectors which can really change what India’s future is going to look like.

Today in a situation where we are, we believe that our founders have that energy, enthusiasm. If funded with the right kind of capital, right set of mentors, they can really unleash the kind of growth that India wants to achieve. So that’s where Niveshaay comes as a bridge to back these companies in terms of financial capital, in terms of investors they want to get on board, or mentors they want to get on board, or even other resources that they want to get on board. So that’s what Niveshaay is all about.

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: Sir, can you explain what does Niveshaay do?

ARVIND KOTHARI: So Niveshaay tries to pool capital from various set of investors or family offices or entrepreneurs and tries to give it to sectors or companies which are growing fast, like energy sector in the country or recycling sector in the country or maybe the computing power ecosystem that we want in the country.

That’s where we are: a bridge between founders which want to grow fast and the capital which wants to get deployed in those set of founders. That’s what Niveshaay in brief does.

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: Got it. Ayush.

AYUSH SINHAL: Thank you Ganesh. This is the first time that I’m on the other side of the camera. Otherwise I’ve been just consuming your videos and the other podcasts throughout my life and learning from it. Thank you for giving this opportunity.

I’m the CEO and co-founder of Kimbal. We started this company in 2011 with the vision to actually digitize the energy grid, the energy sector all in all. And that is what we have been doing. It’s a product company made in India, made for India and for the world. So yeah, we’ll cover the company further in detail.

One thing that you said, to share how energy sector or how this crisis can give the opportunity to create a… you mentioned million dollar or a billion dollar company.

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: Million dollar companies.

AYUSH SINHAL: Million dollar. I think this sector has the potential to create multi-trillion dollar companies.

Understanding India’s Power Crisis

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: Wow guys. First let’s understand the problem better. Why is India the fourth largest economy still facing a power problem?

ARVIND KOTHARI: So we have three issues at hand. One is the coal output problem. The other is the grid infrastructure problem. Third is the T&D losses problem.

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: Got it. Sir, could you please go deeper and explain each problem properly?

# The Three Core Problems

ARVIND KOTHARI: So Ganesh, if you look at what our country has been doing in the power sector, it was crippled with a lot of policy problems in the past where there was no growth in terms of coal output and still the power plants were put up. Hence these power plants could not make power at the cost that they wanted to because they had to import a lot of coal. That is where the whole crisis started.

So biggest problem has been the losses, the T&D losses that our country has. It’s a problem of leakage, right? You can keep on producing more power, but if it is getting leaked out of the system, the losses keep on mounting and we have almost 15 to 16% kind of a loss versus a China where the losses are just 2%.

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: 2%?

ARVIND KOTHARI: Yes. So that’s where the gap… just imagine any business has EBITDA margin of what, 14, 15% at max, right? And if 15% is just shaved off from these kind of losses in a commodity kind of a sector, how can you make profits? The whole ecosystem doesn’t make profit, hence it is very difficult to seed a lot of investment in that sector.

So what we are looking at, the government is trying to plug the loopholes. And please understand, India and China are at the forefront of the energy ecosystem if you think about the capabilities. And we can blame India about a lot of things. But if you go to the grids in the western world, there are grids which have not had investment for decades. They’ve invested very heavily in technology. So the 20, 25 years kind of technology bull run that the U.S. had… but it is now facing a crisis because it did not invest in the energy ecosystem in terms of grid infrastructure, in terms of power manufacturing and hence their data centers are facing a power crisis.

We in our country are lucky that at least the capacities are there and capacities are getting built. It is a problem of the whole political will to reduce the T&D losses which is the forefront issue over here. Because if you look at renewable energy, our capacities are growing faster than the U.S. In China also the same thing is happening, right?

So in terms of manufacturing of these components as well, solar panels, windmills, T&D equipment, India is at the forefront. In fact, U.S. is importing a lot of this stuff from India and China, right?

# The Coal Production Challenge

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: First is, you stated that we used to import coal. We are the fifth largest producer of coal, right? Then why did we have to import coal?

ARVIND KOTHARI: So the whole problem was that Coal India, which is a government monopoly, couldn’t increase its output by more than 2% for a decade altogether. And that’s where the energy demand is always higher at 7, 8% and the output of coal is just 2%. And that’s where the whole crisis of domestic coal availability, not the mines but the availability in terms of output was because of the inefficiencies that the monopoly had.

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: But why? So why didn’t they produce more power?

ARVIND KOTHARI: See, it’s a government undertaking, right? And it faces a lot of challenges in terms of approval. So it’s just not about whether Coal India wants to produce or not. It’s also about the judiciary and the local public, their revolt and whether approvals of those mines take time. So the whole process in a way took a lot of time.

And then the bureaucracy of the company itself meant that the output could not be brought on time, which we wanted. And that’s where I guess we got crippled in this crisis which led to import of a lot of coal, exchequer doling out a lot of dollars out of the country and the whole power cost in the country did not come down, even though the capacity was there.

# The Renewable Energy Solution

So I guess with renewables that problem is getting solved. We don’t need any output which is going to come from a mine or any input which is coming from any of the natural resources. The resource which is available full time. And the whole problem is being solved by entrepreneurs and the government building an ecosystem about solar and wind, where the hybrid parks or with storage…

Now, with the whole solution, now we are looking at where almost the country’s incremental demand is completely met by renewables and even replacement demand is met by renewables. And that is where I believe a lot of these challenges… if we solve the storage problem. So renewables have a storage problem. They cannot be stored. So now already the government has been working on hybrid parks where storage is also there. Two hour storage will then go to four hour storage.

So I believe the problems of the past would not haunt us in the future because we’ve made very good investments in the grid and we are doing that. Power Grid has done a phenomenal job in terms of making our grid able to transact power between states. It’s very difficult. In U.S., you don’t have that. In U.S. there are states which don’t talk to each other. In India we have all the states who talk to each other in terms of energy flow and hence the ecosystem is robust.

We need to upgrade it for the modern requirements of the renewable energy sector. But if that is in tandem, going hand in hand, we believe the solution to this problem is in the very near future.

Understanding T&D Losses

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: Got it. And the second problem that you mentioned was T&D losses. Can you explain T&D losses in simple words?

Understanding TND Losses in India’s Power Sector

ARVIND KOTHARI:

So TND losses in simple words is basically you’re producing an output of 100 units, but when it is going and reaching the end consumer, it is only reaching around 85 units. So there are 15 units being lost.

15 units can be lost due to various factors. Either you’re not stepping up and stepping down power efficiently because the grid needs to transport the power. So there can be losses in the transportation that are natural, but those also can be reduced by investment in the grid.

Then there can be leakages in terms of people drawing unauthorized power in a country where a lot of consumers draw that unauthorized power. And also there can be a lot of issues in terms of manufacturing the power.

So power cannot be stored, right? If it is manufactured, it needs to be dispatched. So if the demand and supply is not matched properly, we lose power over there also. So a lot of substation infrastructure needs to be upgraded to do that.

The State of India’s Grid Infrastructure

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN:

And so the third problem that we spoke about was the grid infrastructure. In fact we had Shreya over here some time ago. She is the co-founder of Solar Square and she said that the grid infrastructure in India is broken and that needs to be fixed. So what do you first of all mean by a grid infrastructure and what is broken about it?

ARVIND KOTHARI:

Yeah, so what is a grid? Please understand a grid is basically an infrastructure where there are transmission lines which are set up for the power to reach the consumers. Right.

So if I’m producing in for example Kachav, Gujarat, I need electricity in Surat. So it needs to be transmitted and that happens through these transmission lines. And the grid is set up by the power grid of country and it has a lot of players which help power grid to do that. But that is where the whole grid infrastructure is put up to transport power.

Now this transportation can be just within Gujarat, can be just within Rajasthan or within Maharashtra. But we have been lucky that there have been a lot of investment made in the country to build a national grid which then talks to each other and then any power surplus in the state can be transported to a deficient state.

And that infrastructure though is a bit outdated in certain places is needed to be fixed, but we have the necessary ingredients. I would say it is not broken to the extent that we’ve seen in Europe or maybe in the US. It is definitely much, much better as infrastructure which can enable a lot of new technologies that we are talking about.

And if done properly, the TND losses in the country can also reduce if these upgrades are happening. Of course the old grid was made by a thesis that power would be made at a particular place and it would be transported to the consumers in the whole country.

But now the reality is every household can be a producer of power by solar or every company can be a producer of power with solar and these kind of technologies, right? So now we have a problem that you need a two-way communication in the grid, that there can be consumers and producers at the same time at every household or every corporate.

And that is where, if not properly enabled, the grid could cripple or the grid crisis could come because it is not able to do these adjustments of collecting and disseminating power. And that is where we are talking about that energy ecosystem has a great runway in our country because we will need a lot of investments to enable the grid.

A lot of companies would come around with solutions of selling power to each other, which Kimbal is also in a way producing a software which can enable buying and selling of power on the exchange. So we have an exchange ecosystem in a country where power is freely traded.

So what I’m trying to tell you is we can look at the problem. There is a problem. But the point is where are we in terms of the solution? So we have built the blocks already. It will require significant investment. But we are not far away out because if the basic building blocks were not there, we might have taken maybe 15, 20 years.

Now with these blocks in place, we are maybe 5, 7 years away from the solution rather than 10, 20 years away from the solution.

The Power Supply Chain Explained

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN:

That is amazing, sir. Ayush, could you please lay down the entire supply chain of power and help me understand how is power delivered to the households of India all the way from the production of coal?

AYUSH SINHAL:

So the start of the supply chain is the manufacturing unit which we call generation over here. So you have Coal India extracting coal and then feeding it to thermal power plants. These thermal power plants in turn then produce energy.

This energy is then, so what happens is the energy has to be evacuated from the source to be taken to the destination which is the consumers like us on the grid. This is done by transmission. Transmission steps up the power so that the losses are minimized. They get from the source to the demand and then from the demand side the distribution jobs come in.

Distribution role is to actually distribute power to every consumer. See how much a consumer has consumed, bill it accordingly and then do the collection. This is where the distribution comes in.

So the consumer has an option to buy power either from the distribution companies or they have the power to buy power directly from a factory, directly from a generating plant. That is where these trading companies like we have IEX and PXIL coming in in the picture. So this is how if you look at the complete value chain of the energy flow through.

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN:

So first comes Coal India, then we go to power generation. Then power transmission happens and then power distribution happens. And then we have the traders. Right. So discoms, if I’m not wrong, fall where? Power distribution.

AYUSH SINHAL:

Distribution. Yes.

The Discom Crisis: Why Are They Bleeding Money?

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN:

Discoms is a classic case study. For the longest time we’ve been hearing that Indian discoms are in losses. And these are not losses worth hundred crores or 200 crores. We’re talking about thousands of crores. In fact the last time I checked I think it was somewhere around 38,000 crores or 40,000 crores. So we have coal. We are getting electricity at an affordable rate. How are discoms in losses?

AYUSH SINHAL:

Interestingly, the number is way higher than that. It is around 2% of India’s GDP.

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN:

2% of India’s GDP? Yes. Is what we are losing. Yes. Why?

AYUSH SINHAL:

The problem is not somewhere in the demand or the supply. It is in between. So think of it as a water pipeline. Right?

You are feeding water at one end and you are drawing power at the other end. The leakage is in between. And you are unable to detect where the leakages are. And you’re just bleeding or you’re just leaking energy out of that.

And the system is so large that is impossible to detect without modernizing. Without actually having the information on what is happening where. And you don’t have even taps. So even if you get to know that there’s a leakage at some area, there’s no tap that you can regulate sitting over here. So that’s another challenge that you face in the grid today.

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN:

Are those TND losses?

ARVIND KOTHARI:

Yeah.

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN:

Okay. Vivek sir, can you throw more light on that as to why do we have this problem? Like Arvind sir mentioned that we lose 15% of our energy because of TND losses. And in China it’s 2 to 3%. Why is India so far behind?

The Changing Power Ecosystem

VIVEK JAIN:

So the basic as Arvind and Ayush were talking about recently that now the whole ecosystem has changed. Earlier it was only there’s one power producer. They are consumers. And the consumer were also the quantity of consumption was less.

The mind was ready. “4 hours power will not be there every day. I will go on the street, play around. I’m ready,” right? The whole mindset is changing. The power consumption increasing exponentially.

Ganesh, if I ask you in your home now, earlier it was there in one bedroom. Air condition will be there now in almost, I’m sure in all your rooms the air conditioning is there. You must be using an EV now because that’s the new, I recently heard is saying no charges on an EV if you use that. Right? So people are transitioning to that. Right?

So if you see the airports coming up, what are airports? They are power guzzlers, right? We see data center as now Ayush was mentioning that 99% of power will go to the AI. So that’s the whole thing happening.

So now we have producers actually everywhere, right? The government was not ready. Actually nobody was ready in the world. Right? Nobody thought that the solar production, especially solar can be at any home can have a 10 kilowatt, 5 kilowatt at their home. At their home and in home the power consumption is not there because everybody goes to school, the offices and now what to do with that power.

So Modi ji, the government has done a great job in getting this solar into the country and they’re working very hard today practically the solar production, the cost in India is among the cheapest in the world which is actually helping the GDP to grow.

Because if we want the GDP to grow the country then the power has to be there and the power has to be rightly available plus rightly used. It cannot be wasted. As we understand from electronics that once power is produced, if it is not stored or if it’s not used, it’s gone. It’s not like it’s a perishable item, right? It’s gone. Right?

So now when we see BESS coming in, the battery energy solar system coming in, right? Where companies like us, when we have power producer on the rooftop solar we have in our plant, like we have 10 megawatt right now, if we are not consuming power, we can store the power or we can supply to the grid.

So that’s why the grid modernization of maybe having smart meters or maybe having SCADA system building, all those things are very important to ultimately help the Indian economy to reach to the dream which we have of 2047. That’s where I’m coming from.

The Solar Revolution in India

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN:

Got it. Arvind sir, I read in your research that India is embracing solar because there has been a drastic drop in the cost of production via solar. Can you explain what that is about? And why are we suddenly seeing a rise of the solar revolution in India?

The Solar Revolution and Smart Meter Opportunity

ARVIND KOTHARI: Correct. So when we first started to bet on the solar sector, there was a lot of disbelief in the whole ecosystem, in the investment community everywhere. It’s a sector which is funded by the government. When was the… In fact, we started investing 2019, but I go far back, went on 13, 14. We in fact wrote a report which was a white paper which was presented on solar in the country and had power cost to be at 16 rupees per unit when it was made from solar versus 4 or 3 rupees that were made from coal.

So solar was almost 4x more expensive than what coal output was able to produce in the country. But what was happening is that it was falling off the cliff, the power generation cost from solar because the solar panel cost was reducing dramatically. It is like every other technology like you look at computing. The computing cost has gone down by 90 percent and then gone down by 90% and then gone down by 90% almost three, four times in the past 20, 25 years. So this is what is happening with solar also.

And when such a technology is reducing cost, it is very tough for its competing technologies to then take over. And you think about it as a power solution. Solar is plug and play. You look at any other… So the problem that I was talking about in the earlier piece on why Coal India output did not take pace with the energy generation because the output needs to be mined and then there should be a power plant put up by NTPC and then the power generation happens and then it needs to be transported. The whole ecosystem from mining till NTPC putting up a plant can take 4, 5 years to come together, right?

If you think about solar, you just need a piece of land. Panels can be produced in the same day and they can be transported to the site. And the whole substation and ecosystem can just take 4 months, 5 months, 6 months at max to be brought to life. You think about any other solution in this world which is power hungry, as Ayush was talking about or Vivek was talking about. We need AI which needs power right now. And nuclear is talking about the solution ten years from now.

Gas powered power plants are having shortages in terms of equipment. They’re five years delays in terms of a lot of those kind of power plants that are being put in the US. Here you have a solution that can be put up as and when you want, plug and play it anywhere that you want and is reducing cost of producing power because the equipment cost is falling. Raw material is practically free. So you don’t have any variables, right? It is not that I need uranium or I need coal or I need XYZ. The power can be generated by a resource which is freely available.

There is no fluctuation in terms of the timeline of putting up that power plant and there is no fluctuation in the equipment cost much. In fact, it is reducing every year. So that is where it is an insane technology which is going to be dominant no matter what the world talks about that this problem doesn’t have a solution. This has a solution.

The Intermittency Challenge and Battery Storage

The only problem with solar is that it is intermittent. It cannot be generated 24 by 7. So you have to solve for the intermittency. Now how do you solve for the intermittency? That is where battery storage comes into picture, which was also expensive if you talk about five years ago, which has reduced by almost 50% in the past five years, which can also have the same technology cost which solar had maybe 15 years ago. And it can also reduce by 90% in the coming decade.

So that is where a solution of intermittency, if it is clubbed with solar, is a powerful technology which can outpace any other technology that we are talking about.

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: Sir, what was the cost per unit for production of energy via solar in 2009 versus today in 2025?

ARVIND KOTHARI: So 2009, if you talk about it would be around 20, 22 rupees per unit and today it has fallen off toward 1.8 or 2 rupees. That’s a kind of reduction, that almost 90% reduction in the cost that we’ve seen already. And if you talk about the equipment cost in terms of solar panel manufacturing ecosystem that our country has, it is further reducing and it will further reduce in the coming five, seven years.

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: Got it.

VIVEK JAIN: Cost has come to 1.6 now.

ARVIND KOTHARI: 1.6. Okay, so almost like 94%, 95%.

Micro Grids and Village Electrification

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: Sir, this makes solar almost miraculous because the cost is decreasing with time. And the best part is like you mentioned, there is no requirement of a very complex supply chain. So is it safe to say that the next 100 villages in India that will be electrified, will be electrified by solar and not the grid?

ARVIND KOTHARI: Yeah. So if you think about lot of these villages can have a micro grid which can be like storage and solar just there for that ecosystem or for that village or for that cluster of villages. And you do not put them up in the main grid. That is where US is also now talking about micro grids for these data centers where they need not be connected to the grid for their energy requirements because then they can create a lot of havocs on the grid. Right?

So that kind of solution already has just one bottleneck which is the power storage cost. People are talking about storing it through via green hydrogen as I was talking about, or battery storage, but both cost currently at this stage are not viable for 100% storage solution. Maybe battery energy storage is now viable for 3, 4 hours. It will get more viable when it is more viable to store energy for 24 hours. That is where we believe that the takeoff can be miraculous as you were talking about.

The Smart Meter Opportunity

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: Got it. And this takeoff will have two massive opportunities. Firstly, because there is two way power transmission that’s happening which is where the demand for smart meters will shoot up. And secondly, there will also be a huge demand for batteries. Like Vivek sir said, power is perishable. If you don’t store it, you will lose it. So Arvind sir, is it safe to say that with the increase in number of solar panels there will also be a disproportionate increase in the number of smart meters and batteries? Which means there’s a massive opportunity there, right?

ARVIND KOTHARI: So if you think about the solar opportunity is the incremental opportunity, right, that you need to put up for the energy that is being demanded every year. But the problem that you need to solve in terms of the grid communicating or the smart meter that you want to put in or the energy that you want to store, it is a problem that you need to solve for all the existing capacity and the new capacity that is going to come up.

So if you look at there was a survey that was made maybe in 2016, 17 by the government where we had almost 250 million meters in the country which need to be smart. Now today that number would be anywhere between 300, 350 million. And by 2030 it is expected that it will be around 500 million meters. Now if you imagine we have only converted close to about 20, 25 million meters to smart and we have to convert now 500 million meters to be smart meters in the country.

People talk about that Zomato is the biggest opportunity in the country because so many households they are serving, how many percentage of the household. And you think about how much percentage of the household will a smart meter have an opportunity to be in, collecting data, disseminating data to the government, being a piece which is solving the energy equation. So the size of the opportunity over here is huge.

If you think in terms of how it is going to solve the data collection problem and the T&D loss problem and battery energy storage also, it will need to have in corporates, in households. And that is where Nandan Nilekani I guess has been talking about that it is the next UPI moment of the country. And I believe as an ecosystem this will change a lot of things that people talk about our country. If we get this act together, whatever problems that we are currently facing, people blaming India for a lot of infrastructure challenges, this, that, a lot of things from that power angle, there are a lot of things which are very rightly placed in terms of the government support, government infrastructure and the money that these companies have raised in terms of putting up that capacity in the country.

So I believe that ecosystem can really be one of the best ecosystem that is investable in our country at this point.

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: Sir, this is amazing. So you are telling me that India will need 500 million smart meters and we will need what, hundred companies?

Market Consolidation and Efficiency

ARVIND KOTHARI: The whole piece that the government has tried to solve is by bringing in companies which can deploy the smart meters on the ground. And they’ve been given a free hand to choose the meter companies that they want to deal with. So here you’re not communicating with the government. You are now communicating with private enterprises who are deploying the meters on ground. And the meter companies need to then become vendors with these companies.

And the whole collection mechanism works in a way that the efficiency of collection is what determines your payment in terms of what you get from the government. So if the meter is not efficient, you don’t get the collection that you are aiming for. And hence the whole system is made for efficiency. So like in other sectors, what we are seeing is the most efficient company wins.

So currently also in our country, there are hardly three, four companies which are like almost 80% market share in the country. And we have Kimbal today on the podcast which has become the second largest and aiming for becoming the largest. And they will have a market share of almost 30% this year. 30% in this market which is growing at this astronomical pace is what the size of the opportunity we are talking about.

Ayush’s Origin Story

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: Ayush bro, how on earth did you discover this gold mine? This is insane, bro. Because you know the reason why I think this is insane is because we often see the opportunities that are glorified. Like Arvind spoke about Zomato, Swiggy, UPI, content creation. All of these things are seen as massive opportunities. And Nikhil Kamath often says that the most amount of money can be made with boring businesses. That is why he’s made a lot of money.

But tell me something. Today you generate 2,400 crores in revenue. When did you start?

AYUSH SINHAL: We started in 2011.

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: 2011. So you’ve been operating this company for about 14 years and today you’re generating 2,400 crores in revenue. How on earth did you discover the demand for smart meters in 2011?

AYUSH SINHAL: I still remember when I was doing my engineering in Bangalore. So we all, we used to, we stayed in a flat, three of us, we stayed in a flat and we used to get our money, pocket money every month. Well, in time. But the least priority was given to paying the energy bills. So we used to approach it to pay off the Internet bill. I think the Internet bill used to come, the priority was way higher than the energy bill.

And then someone from BESCOM, that was the discom in Bangalore, used to come at the end of the month, disconnect your power supply and go back. And we used to come back from college and realize, oh, there’s no power. And we didn’t pay for it. And we used to just collect the money within matter of minutes. So there was the willingness to pay was always there. It was just that the priority was low because you could afford to do that, right?

And when that happens, we used to go somewhere, get the linemen to pay them, do whatever it takes and reinstate the power, right? And I still remember that led me to search if it’s happening with us. How many consumers are facing this particular piece or how many… What is the default rate of a consumer or what is the willful defaulters? You can say any number, astonish me.

I still remember just to be on the conservative side and on the higher side, 92 or 93% of the energy that reaches the consumer is billed. So balance gets lost. And out of the billed only 94 or 95% is collected. So balance again gets lost. So as I said, right in the pipeline there are multiple leakages, is just one.

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: So you just discovered that there were a lot of boys like yourself who are not paying electricity bills. So the discoms might be facing a problem collecting these bills. So you want to find an efficient way for them to collect money from boys.

The Power Sector’s Fundamental Challenges

AYUSH SINHAL: I still remember back in 2011, I was in my fourth year of college. We were still talking about what my grandfather used to talk about: electricity, food, waste. These were the rudimentary issues that we were talking about. Whereas, as a kid in a college, we were talking about smartphones, we were talking about Internet coming in 2G, 3G, 4G. But the basic pieces were just not there at pace.

And as you said, glamorous industries do seek all the attention and get the best of the minds to work on it. But the power sector is the backbone of anything and everything, and it takes time to build something like this. It took us 13 to 14 years to scale to where we are. But now the trajectory is something like a hockey stick.

Just recently, yesterday, I read an article by Elon Musk who says that real competition to his AI model, the Grok, is not OpenAI. It’s not Google. It is China, and China because of two reasons. One, because of the chips, the capability and ability to manufacture advanced chips, the manufacturing competency that they have. And second is the energy, the abundance of energy.

AI just needs energy to function. And we are entering an era where everything and anything is touched by AI. So that is where the energy plays an important role in anything and everything that we do in the nation building, in the economy, or every company that is there.

Spotting the Market Opportunity

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: Got it. So Ayush, like I said, you’re generating 2,400 crores in revenue by making smart meters. Help me understand, how did you spot this gap at the macro level? At the micro level, you mentioned that you did not pay the electricity bills, because of which you discovered a gap. Now, at the macro level, how did you take this company forward and how did you anticipate this growth? Or did you even anticipate this growth?

AYUSH SINHAL: You started in 2011. We realized the energy demand in the country is going to increase like anything. There was definitely an aspirational growth that was driving the demand, and more than that, industrialization and everything. And we’ve been just discussing how energy is the key, right?

So one, we were bullish on saying that the energy demand is going to increase. Second, the sector was plagued with inefficiencies. With every unit sold or every rupee of energy that you sell, if you lose one rupee, so imagine when you start selling 100 rupee worth of energy, you start making losses of 100 rupee. So that’s the second piece that we spotted. We realized there’s a massive modernization that is required to support this. And that is what gave birth to Kimbal.

Understanding Smart Meters

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: Got it. What exactly is a smart meter and how is it different from a conventional meter?

AYUSH SINHAL: See, the dumb meters have always been there. The challenge with the dumb meter is the information which is recording is just not accessible anywhere in the world. You have to physically access that particular device and download the data. Now imagine in India, a country like India, which has 50 crore consumers by 2030, human physically going and accessing and downloading the data is next to impossible.

Whereas a smart meter has two key pieces. One, whatever information is recording, it can relay that information to a remote location, to any cloud, on your mobile phone. You can access that data. That is how it is. Second, critical piece is that it can regulate your demand. It can switch off your load, it can power on again, reinitiate your load. More than that, it can somewhere stabilize, saying that you cannot draw more than 5 kilowatt, you cannot draw more than 6 kilowatt. So this is what a smart meter does.

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: Got it.

AYUSH SINHAL: And third critical piece over here is the measurement is way more efficient than what it was done in the traditional meters.

VIVEK JAIN: Right.

AYUSH SINHAL: See, generally if you look at any device that you procure, so let’s say if you buy a mobile phone, you put a mobile cover to it, you put a screen laminate on top of it because you want the device to last. Whereas a consumer behavior with an energy meter or with a smart meter is that the device should stop recording from tomorrow.

The first thing that a consumer gets to know when they interact with me, that we do smart metering, the first thing that they want to know is how do they stop a smart meter? How do they reduce their energy bill by the smart meter not functioning? So the meters are designed in such a way that they’re more efficient, they record the energy better, and they’re actually immune towards the consumer tampering. This is where the smart meter comes in.

The Distribution Model

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: Got it. So after making these meters, who did you go and sell this to?

AYUSH SINHAL: We sell this to Discoms. In Delhi, we have Tata Power and BSES is the discom. So they are our customers.

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: When you sell this to Discoms, they then go and install these meters at the customer’s house.

AYUSH SINHAL: Most of the discoms in the country are government owned. 95% of the discoms in the country are public sectors. Right now the government realized that it is impossible for them, for the discom people and for them to roll out such a massive operation in time. We’re talking about 100% replacement. This massive activity has never been done anywhere in the world.

So what they did was they called intermediary. In between, smart meters come in with different components and they together solve a problem of the customer which is better revenue, better collection, better efficiency.

VIVEK JAIN: Right.

AYUSH SINHAL: These components are: one is the smart meter which is the measurement box. Second is the connectivity, getting the data online. And third is application running on the cloud which is processing the data and converting into information. These three together they form a solution. They actually address your problem. You buy any of the best component, a single component not interacting well together or not integrated well together will have zero impact.

So here what they did was they said I need an integrator in between. I need the integrator to select the three different components, deploy it on ground, and then run it for life. This is where a company like contracting companies like Tata Power, Adani Power or Nagarjuna Construction Company, Monte Carlo, these are the companies. They come in, they win the contract from the Egyptian company, and then we supply to them.

Demand Regulation and Consumer Behavior

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: Got it. How can it regulate the demand and supply? Because by deploying a smart meter, you can definitely measure efficiency. I’m able to envision how will the calculation be more accurate as compared to the existing meters. But how will the regulation happen? How will you prompt me to stop charging my car?

AYUSH SINHAL: So what I can do is I can regulate by saying that, okay, the charges are in kilowatts. Let’s say your normal demand of an AC and a light may be 3 kilowatt. The charger puts an additional load of 3 kilowatts. So I can put a ceiling of saying that you will just draw 3 kilowatt for this period of time. As soon as your energy goes above that, your electricity completely will be cut off.

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: But wouldn’t that require my permission?

ARVIND KOTHARI: Yes.

AYUSH SINHAL: So obviously you need to participate in programs like this. And what is happening is, see, you will be incentivized to participate over here and your tariff will go down eventually.

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: Can you explain?

AYUSH SINHAL: So what will happen is, I’ll give you again an example. In Maharashtra, the chief minister has come up with a fantastic program where he’s saying that the consumer will have a different tariff for solar hours and a different tariff for non-solar hours. This is called time of use billing.

ARVIND KOTHARI: Time of use billing.

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: Okay.

AYUSH SINHAL: So eventually the consumer will start charging their vehicles during the solar hours. You’ll wash your clothes during the solar hours and eventually your bill will reduce. So this is how playing with the demand and supply eventually reduces your energy cost.

So here I’ll come as a utility, maybe over here as a Maha Discom. I’ll come to you and Ganesh, I’ll say, “Ganesh, if you participate in a demand response program whenever there’s crisis, I want you to reduce your load. I want you to reduce your load maybe by 20%, 30%.” And you can do that because these are the auxiliary loads or supply that you have, which you can always do.

If you do that, I’ll give you a rebate of 20% over your total bill. See, because the utility, when there’s crisis, when the power plant from Kutch didn’t supply, when they have to go to a trader like an IEC to buy, they buy the power which is generally available at 2 rupees or 3 rupee, at maybe 15 rupee, at maybe even 20 rupee. Whereas as a consumer we will be paying only around 6 to 7 rupee. So that is where for them, for you to cut down your, regulate your demand, will eventually reduce the overall power cost.

The Equity Question

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: One question that I had, Ayush, is that when it comes to a poor consumer, for them this incentive means a lot. They can actually change their habits just so that they can have these incentives. But as you go to the top of the pyramid, the incentive is not lucrative enough.

For example, if you tell me that I will save 20% of my electricity bill if I don’t charge my car, I will never listen to you. So isn’t this in a way controlling the behavior of the consumer at the bottom of the pyramid while giving all the liberty in the world to the people at the top of the pyramid? Because as they say, fine is nothing but the amount of money that you pay to commit the crime.

VIVEK JAIN: Interesting, right?

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: So here you’re essentially telling me that instead of the fine, incentive is just a better word for a fine. Because what you’re essentially doing is that you’re changing the pricing structure in such a way that instead of saying that I will take money from you, you’re saying that I will take less money from you if you do a certain thing, a certain way. So don’t you think that is an injustice being done to the people at the bottom of the pyramid?

AYUSH SINHAL: See, again, if you look at the country, today, 90% of the users sit in that pyramid. If you’re able to reduce the cost by whatever it is and by getting the consumer to participate in that particular program, that is fantastic. And over there, 20%, 30% matters a lot.

And it is just not 20%, 30% of today’s cost. The cost is increasing because the behavior trend is changing. Today, the EVs, the two wheeler, three wheeler or four wheelers, whatever they have, they’re going to be charged from the grid. Now, that percentage of the money is spent on petrol or diesel or something like that. So the bill is going to increase. And over there, the 20, 30% matters immensely.

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: Got it. But EVs are extremely costly. And if you look at the behavioral pattern of consumption at the bottom of the pyramid, it’s usually only for necessary consumption. It’s used for fans and not ACs. It’s used to watch TV, which the poor consumer watches barely for an hour. It’s used for charging your phone or it’s used for studying.

And if you tell them that if you consume less power or if you consume power at a certain time, don’t you think the father of the house is going to care more about the electricity bill than the child who’s studying under the fan?

From Consumer to Prosumer

AYUSH SINHAL: So a couple of things over here again. One, I will link it to the PM Suryaghar Yojana that we have. The Prime Minister of the country has a very ambitious goal of saying that 1 crore household will have a solar panel on their rooftop.

Now interestingly, for a certain set of consumers, just from being consumers you can become a prosumer or you can become a producer. What do you mean by producer is, I am a generator now. I am producing power and I can sell it to the grid. I can sell it to my peer. This is what Arvind sir, when he mentioned that Nandan Nilekani is saying and he’s been consulted by the government of saying that let’s create an Indian energy stack and that can be India’s next UPI movement.

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: Got it.

AYUSH SINHAL: Where Indian energy stack means every device will start communicating in a universal method and these consumers can start trading energy. So let’s say when I have extra power I can just give it to you Ganesh and I can sell it to you and you can pay me. So instead of just being a consumer of power I can start earning money out of it by producing and selling.

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: Got it. So what you’re saying is that we will not just change the way people use power but we’ll also enable people to produce more power. Because of which they won’t be constrained.

ARVIND KOTHARI: Yes.

Identifying Investment Opportunities in Energy Solutions

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: Correct. Okay. Whom should I approach? Let’s say I have a solution for this. Whom should I approach?

AYUSH SINHAL: Utilities today are hungry for solutions like this. Today the new age utilities like Tata Power, like Adani, they’re waiting for someone to come in and offer them something.

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: Can a youngster come and do this at Kimbal?

AYUSH SINHAL: Definitely yes. The journey that you were talking about, right from 2011, from a 10 lakh revenue company to a 2,400 crore company, right? This has been done because of the people that we have. So this company truly believes in people.

The whole culture that we have, we have a culture of saying that there’s a culture of absolute trust in candor. We believe in saying that there’s no rules and we mean it. You know, today any individual, so there’s no age bias in this organization. I think one, me being so young, that today on a table a 23 year old kid’s voice and a 50 year old voice has the same weightage. So that’s one beautiful thing that we’ve done over here.

Another thing to look at, see today, if I want to buy equipment, if I want to allocate a budget and whatever the amount may be, I’m scared of saying that in front of my investors. But whatever that amount may be, whether it is 10 lakh, 1 crore, 50 crore, if you’re aligned towards the company’s goal, if you’re aligned towards the company vision, you don’t need any approval. So that is the kind of culture that we’ve built.

There is zero attendance over here. There is zero expense policy. We just have a book of trust. You need to align yourself with that. So what do we believe is the problems this energy transition is throwing at you? It is something new. This problem was just not there yesterday. Yesterday we were not talking about solar, right? These problems have come up now.

So you need newer solutions. So this is where agility matters. This is where innovation matters. And Kimbal is a perfect platform for that. Kimbal has built that platform where someone can just come in, think of a problem, think of a solution and start running towards it.

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: That’s amazing man. So are you telling me that an intern can come into your company, identify a problem and get a budget to build an enterprise within an enterprise to go and solve that problem?

AI-Powered Grid Solutions

AYUSH SINHAL: Very recently we had three kids from IIT Delhi and three from IIT Bombay. They ended up building a solution which can be explosive, which can change the complete way the grid operates. Today again, young kids, they don’t know anything. They’re not bounded by any limitation, right?

What they did was they worked very closely with the utility, with the discom in the country. By just analyzing the data, they were able to map which transformer supplies power to which all consumers. This is one of the most difficult things. Generally people go physically and map it. Okay, this is the transformer. The wire is going to Ganesh’s house, the wire is going to Vivek’s house, the wire is going to Arvind’s house. So this transformer is applying to these three houses.

What they did was using AI, they found a signature through which with a 95% accuracy, they have been able to detect which consumer is connected to which transformer. Now this particular simple solution can literally cut down the 2% losses to zero overnight. So 2 lakh crore losses can go down to zero. Because this enables certain functionality for the utility to be used where they can pinpoint the leakages, where they can pinpoint the losses and plug it immediately. That is the power of this particular solution.

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: Understood. So the first opportunity lies in data analysis. The second and third opportunity lies in the second piece.

Three Major Opportunities in Energy Tech

AYUSH SINHAL: We are all talking about EVs and I think every other house has an EV today, right? For an EV you don’t go to a petrol pump, you go to a charging station. The electrons are flowing and charging, right? A simple app to unify all the charges has massive potential, right? Just not that, scheduling when to charge, when not to charge is going to have massive potential.

So vehicles, you need to think of vehicles as batteries, as moving batteries on the grid which can be plugged in and plugged out as and when required. So the concept is called V2X or V2G, vehicle to grid. This particular domain is explosive. You can have hundreds of Kimbals just in this particular domain itself.

Third one I believe solar, right? Solar has again tremendous potential.

ARVIND KOTHARI: Again.

AYUSH SINHAL: You have a solar park. There’s a lot of analysis that you can do. You can work with the data to increase the yield of that particular asset and it doesn’t require any cost. So you put in hundreds of crores to put in that capex of solar plant and maybe just with lakhs of rupees you can increase the yield by percentages. So that is one.

The PM Surya Ghar Yojana where the prime minister’s ambition is to put in 1 crore rooftop solar. Now these consumers becoming prosumers. So imagine Ganesh trading energy with Ayush in a real time basis. You have excess energy just like UPI. You PayTM me that energy and I start using it.

Now this P2P trading or how do I access my solar better, how do I feed it to the grid better? This particular opportunity again is tremendous. These are just three of the opportunities that’s coming on top of my mind. There are hundreds of them like that.

The Entrepreneurial Approach to Investing

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: Got it? Understood. Arvind sir, how do you, how did you choose Kimbal and how do you pick companies like these? Because I have read your research papers and the thesis are just so comprehensive that even a newbie will be able to understand the progressions of the Indian stock market very well, right? In fact we’ve presented a lot of your research papers on our videos also. So help me understand how do you identify these companies which eventually go on to become multi-baggers.

ARVIND KOTHARI: So the approach when I actually came to investing was that of entrepreneur because my family background was entrepreneurship. I was in a city which in Gujarat we have entrepreneurship mindset. So the normal way of working, people just try to understand the mechanisms of the market functioning. That never appealed to me. In fact, I failed at investing initially because I was trying to get into that rut of understanding the market.

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: What do you mean by that now?

ARVIND KOTHARI: By meaning to understand the market dynamics is to know how the market is behaving. The behavior of the market is very complex. Every day there are millions of buyers and sellers trying to decide the price of a company. And deep down inside I could not understand that behavior because I thought on first principle basis, it’s a business which has value and the value over the years increases if it is able to grow in terms of its capabilities and the revenues can come later.

The capability part is important because I had seen a lot of companies in the family, within us, a lot of good businesses go down because the capabilities were not being built and a very small business becoming very big even though they were struggling for a decade because they were building capabilities and learning over the years.

So my mindset always was that if I am able to deploy that analogy to understanding businesses in the market, that is where I am more comfortable. I am not that comfortable understanding the market behavior. The human psychology of investing or whatever the books in investing are written about, are written about the psychology of what an investor is or on the psychology of how the markets, and we have stories like this where the greatest of the greatest were being bankrupted in the markets because they could not understand the psychology of the market.

So how we started is, let’s forget about what the psychology of the market is. I don’t know that. Can I understand how a business functions and can I understand how value is created in a business? That is what the starting point was. And initially for almost seven, eight years, we did not have a business model because we were trying to put up research papers as you very rightly talked about. And in India no one pays for that research, right?

Then we started to think that can we bring those research papers to people who are entrepreneurs themselves? And that is where the business model Niveshaay came live, where entrepreneurs like Vivek ji or like a lot of family offices that we have, we presented to them investments like their own business investments and not like any other stock market investment.

I remember when I met Vivek ji, he had some 50 mutual funds, some 30, 40 other funds that he was investing with.

VIVEK JAIN: Total 98.

AYUSH SINHAL: Total 98.

Building Capabilities Over Time

ARVIND KOTHARI: And I thought that why is he approaching this? And the returns were okay, but they were not great. And in his business he was hitting the ball out of the park, right? And then I tried to discuss with him that at Niveshaay, we solved this piece long back, which you have a starting point. Since day one, you can be very good at investing because you’re a very good businessman.

And I truly believe that getting mentorship from people like Vivek ji or from the entrepreneurs has helped me more than getting mentorship from people who are from the market. And that’s where we look at how over the years a capability is being built and capabilities don’t get built in a day or two. Capabilities take a decade to build.

Look at whatever has happened, game changing in the world. The revenues or the profitability of the past decade have been dismal. They have been like, no one would have looked at that investment if they were talking about four, five years ago period. And they completely come to the hockey stick. And that is when the whole public is wanting to invest.

And that is where I thought, can we have a bridge? Can we find these opportunities at the right juncture? And that’s where we started to go very deep down into sectors. We don’t invest in banking or mature sectors. We take up sectors where nothing might have happened but capability might have built up.

And we’ve tried to find out that juncture where the hockey stick is going to maybe play out or maybe even betting when we feel that the capabilities are ripe now. Whether it delivers in two years, three years, five years, we don’t know. But I’m getting this opportunity now. I might not get it if I delay this.

So that is where we over the years done a lot of work in a lot of sectors. And in 2019, 2020 when Covid hit, we had this huge, you can say, realization that the technologies which are going to lead our country to the future are something which are not being very well represented in the listed equity market.

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: What do you mean by that, sir?

The Power of Pattern Recognition in Investing

ARVIND KOTHARI: By that, what I mean is that if I look at the biggest problem that Covid was trying to solve is that how everything can be delivered at home, how you can have a power supply and Internet connection and everything, the data can be transmitted easily because people were working remotely, right? And if you look at most of these technologies were in the US and nothing was there in India. But we had service providers, we had companies which were trying to build solutions around it, but most of them were not listed.

What goals countries took after Covid was coming out is that our planet was breathing much better when Covid shutdowns were happening. So we need more clean energy. And if you look at in our country, we had the giants like NTPC and Tata Power all listed, but very few were talking about clean energy. That is where we realized that power sector is one sector or energy overhaul is one theme that will play out in multiple countries at the same time.

Because of this requirements of data, because of this requirement of the greenhouse gases which were the goals that countries were. The first thing every country after Covid that came and said was that we have this net zero goal by 2030 or 35 or whatever. So that is where we try to link things. And that is where we thought that in our country we have solar energy policies which were in place.

There was nothing in terms of, you can say, fixation of those policies which were very difficult to crack on ground because the power cost was already going down. And then there was a layer of export demand that came for equipment in our country because China was shut down. And there were a lot of problems that people thought in the western world that we cannot be importing a lot from China.

So the whole supply chain rearrangement happened and India kind of became a bright spot where a lot of these turbines, solar panels, a lot of these engineering equipment was trying to be sourced from. And we do a very deep work into understanding the culture in India. We don’t have a very big culture of burning money like in the western world. It is there for technology. But we have a lot of engineering talent and that engineering talent.

India’s Engineering Advantage

We have produced engineering giants like L&T. We produce a lot of, you can say giants which are making gears, giants which are making a lot of these components which are engineering led. And that gives us a huge runway in terms of fitting that culture with the manufacturing ecosystem and bringing this whole power equipment piece alive.

And that’s where we started investing in companies which were building components in solar like panels like you can say glass. And also then focusing on technology piece where we then understood that the whole transmission network needs an upgrade because the two way communication problem of the solar that is there, hence there will be a lot of transformer demand that will be there in the country.

So when we were talking about transformer, a lot of investor friends of me told me, “Arvind, all these Baroda people, you know, there are hundreds of transformer companies every gully you go to Baroda, why this sector is investable. This has not made return for 10 years.” And then Elon Musk talks about that the biggest shortage that the world has seen will be in transformers, right?

So these kind of things are very difficult to imagine if you’re a normal investor sitting in a Bombay or a Delhi office and just looking at the macro picture. You need a lot of data points on ground. How so many companies in transformer had gone bankrupt. What were the problems? What is the current need of transformer is multifold because of the upgrade that is being required in.

And if someone read the policy document that the government was publicly sharing that what bids they were inviting in solar, what bids they were inviting in the transmission capacity, one could easily figure out. But the problem was the numbers were not there.

The Smart Meter Opportunity

Yeah, similar problem with smart meters. There was a lot of policy that the government brought and they were talking about these numbers that we had this 250 million people and we need to shift everything into smart meters. But the numbers were not coming. And hence people were having this disbelief.

But that is where we thought that if there is an entrepreneur who is solving this problem, this is a 500 million meter problem by 2030 and 500 million meter in household where you can take data from them. We thought there can be a lot of layers. But the problem is that the existing players were thinking in a very mundane fashion.

And when first time, you know, I got the Kimbal deck they were trying to raise money since almost a year. And they might have met some 30, 40 organizations. I guess they could not. No one felt that this was an exciting. And I initially three times my analysts came to me and told and I thought I have listed companies in this space. Why should I even look at Kimbal?

But one very interesting piece that my analyst tried to influence me was that the only company which is working on the whole solution that is the smart meter also the communication and dissemination of the data. And that was something which was very powerful. And then. But again, I look at the numbers, I get discouraged when I decided let’s make a visit to this guy, understand what he’s doing.

The First Meeting with Ayush

And the first meeting when I was told that you could sometimes, you know, have to call tractors to, you know, enter that place. So when I entered Munka, I thought why should I even be spending time on this company which is based out of Munka, a small 10,000 square feet kind of a setup. You look people here and there.

But I have figured out in my life is that if you can draw parallels, see, it is nothing you’re doing past analysis. Nothing is going to add value. What is the future if you can draw parallels that if something had happened in some other sector an entrepreneur trying to solve and what then eventually happened.

So when I first met Ayush, his obsessiveness with smart meter as a solution was very hard hitting. And his obsessiveness with what solution he can deliver is the best solution that his consumer wants. Not just the utility but the consumer end consumer which I had not heard any company to talk about.

And then I could relate that was Jeff Bezos also trying to do that. If someone visited Bezos back in 97, 98, he had this obsessive, you know, mindset that boss, I can so solve the problem of a book library. That cannot be done physically, I can do it digitally.

So first I remember first time when we invested the monthly revenue was around 5 to 7 crores every month it was fluctuating. But the point is that every two, three months when we used to interact they were this bunch of energetic people. They could hire people from Tata Power, they could hire people from GE. They were bringing in talent which was unheard of.

Again in my investing history I have heard that people who can draw talent are the entrepreneurs who built successful enterprises. So even though the data was not encouraging but the capability was getting built up.

AYUSH SINHAL: No profit, no profits, but the capability.

ARVIND KOTHARI: Was getting built up. One year down the line, again the profitability is elusive and my investors, Reggie is not asking but other investors are getting jittery. Boss, where are the profits? What is happening with the company?

And then comes a time when they need capital. And again I’m visiting them with this mindset. Boss, we will provide capital. And out of the meeting I’m coming out boss, we can provide them even 200 crores because what they’re building is something phenomenal.

And the good part was that me and could convince the other investors that this is a company which is building something which is very unique. Just don’t look at the profitability but the capability can highlight as a mentor because his role has been phenomenally there to build that profitability piece, to build that discipline, to build that mindset which a large company thinks about and how Kimbal as a startup can think like a large company.

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: How did you do that, sir?

The BCON Framework

VIVEK JAIN: So the exciting part, you know one of our framework which we use in our investment now is called Beacons. Sorry BCON.

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: Okay.

VIVEK JAIN: The BCON is like who’s showing the torch towards the. Like this. He’s one of that entrepreneur, right? So when we saw talk about BCON like it’s talk about the bold. The bold initiatives. I first met him, he came to my home, Arvindji called me that. Okay, let’s meet him. He called and I think so we.

AYUSH SINHAL: Spoke for three to four hours and.

VIVEK JAIN: The deal was done on the day, the same day. And in the morning 6am he had messaged me we are on and we can go avoid, right? So the decision making has to be very quick and has to be bold. That’s where Kimbal talks about.

Then we talk about E is the ethics, the integrity, the integrity level at their company, their family. I checked it with my connect because as he was staying very close to my place so I could get some connect. The first thing the connect told me “Vivek bande dhi ghe kaan gya Garth you can invest money” and there the starting point comes out, right?

And you know when we started to see the culture they’ve got ranked 34th in the great place to work recently.

ARVIND KOTHARI: Oh wow.

VIVEK JAIN: Coca Cola is 35.

AYUSH SINHAL: 32.

Building a World-Class Culture

VIVEK JAIN: 32, right. The Coca Cola is 32. They are 34. A startup kind of a company getting that ranked in the country. And when you go to their culture I had happened to visit their, you know, their annual day and you know there are 400 people and you could see that there are 400 Ayush sitting there talking with such passion. I’m doing this, I’m doing this, I’m doing this. This I don’t find in my company. This is the culture they have built, right?

And when we say that oh the BCON. Oh openness to the competition, you know, very interesting incident. I will tell you. I was, I was. They had a big exhibition in the greater Noida, right? And their Kimbal mega plant which is from 10,000 square feet now to 2 lakh square feet, two and a half lakh square feet they had built up and they had a bid exhibition.

So I told me “Vivek, we have, you know planned that anybody who comes here can go to the visitor plant.” I asked him “come on hell, how can you do it? They can be competitors who will be there.” He said “what is the problem? Let them, let them go. We should be far ahead of competition. What they’re thinking today we have done it already.” So that is that the openness to competition is there, right?

I missed the A part of it, you know, the BCON the A. The agility part. The agility and speed is. I still remember the incident we had invested in January 24. If that the first round, the 350 crore, right? And they took us some. They paid on the money and then they took us this greater node of the Kimbal mega plant before the rent started ticking in they’d already started production.

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: Wow.

Speed and Innovation at Kimbal

VIVEK JAIN: In. In, you get a period, right? You get a period to put up their place and all. They’d already started production, right. Whenever we go to their place now or we meet their team, there’s something new happening. As Arvind just now mentioned about they had this EMS piece coming in.

I am sure that Kimbal is one company which will breed groom at least 25 more companies out of Kimbal in the similar sector solving different problems. Like one problem is the EMS, the data trading second piece they’ve already developed, which is the software which is on your mobile, which can actually tell you which is the device in your home, which can have a safety hazard.

You know, we all worry that there can be fire at the home, right. If you are knowing in advance that this is your device which is not working on your app and in the app you can switch it off. Yeah, right. It is wonderful.

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: That’s incredible, right?

Investing in Speed and Innovation

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: That they’ve already built, right? Then they are also showing that this is the power guzzler in your home. And if you can run at the solar hours, you can save power. This is like helping the country. It’s not only making money, right? Making money is of course a byproduct.

Now this kind of agility and speed, it’s like a big learning to us. How can Action Tessa bring that speed, right? That’s the fun part of it. And the second last piece is the end-to-end thought vision, right? They’re already thinking about what their competitors are doing. They have a proper system of benchmarking the competitors, what they are doing, what kind of product they have. Because finally we have to fight on the price also.

So they have a big program running on the cost. And the cost is not just to reduce, it’s reverse engineering to innovate. Just for an example, in a smart meter they are able to make a smart meter in 38 seconds, 36 seconds. Right now they have pressure from the market that they want more production. But the space is constrained, already 2.5 flex wave, it is gone. Now they’re building up new space.

Now their team, Anirudh, Ayush and their team has built up that they can reduce it to 18 seconds. That means double the production with no investment, right? So you can understand what kind of numbers they can throw in, right? And the second piece they are working heavily on is the quality piece, that the failure rate, because when a smart meter goes and installs at Ganesh’s home and it gets faulty, the discom is having a problem.

AYUSH SINHAL: They cannot earn money.

VIVEK JAIN: Yeah, they will tell the AMISP, “Boss, job now that is thousand bucks.” If their failure rate can go down, the job is done. Why would anybody, because the price will always fight. But the technology they are building, the quality they are building is enormous. So that is the kind of entrepreneurs we love to work with.

Case Study: Betting on Undervalued Companies

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: Sir, can you walk me through three such examples where the companies on the outside were not doing well and you bet on those companies, you were bullish on those companies, you worked with those companies and eventually today they’ve paid you dividends far beyond people’s imaginations?

ARVIND KOTHARI: So the first example that I can come up with is a company called HLE Glasscourt which in a way was a group which was unlisted. But they bought a company called Swiss Glass Coat which was listed on the exchanges in India. And they had 100 crores kind of a market cap. Now it was a very small company. 100 crore would not move the needle for much of the funds.

And the reason why we got excited was that the promoter family was one of the friends of my cousin, which I knew them since almost seven, eight years. And their capability, I knew how they had built, how they think, how Alab, and he was a young engineer used to think and how he could bring that learnings to his own company and build that up. And now that he can do the same thing with the company that he’s acquired.

And that is where a small company of 100 crores got a valuation of close to a billion dollars in the coming four or five years because they went into adjacencies, they reverse merged their own business with this listed company. So this company was making glass line reactors.

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: What is that, sir?

ARVIND KOTHARI: The glass line reactor is a reactor which pharma and chemical companies use to mix a lot of their chemicals and store it also. So here is a company which was just doing a turnover of 40, 50 crores. But the point is that when they merged these two entities, they had this lethal combination of a giant which can be a supplier of pharma and chemical plants. Almost 30% of the value chain was dryers, filters and glass line equipments.

So all pharma giants or chemical giants had to come to this company whenever they were thinking of a plant. And in India we were going through this boom of chemicals and pharma because if you look at Gujarat or Hyderabad, most of these pharma giants were talking about 4x capacity, 5x capacity. Chemical plants were talking about 10x capacity because we had a capability in the country regarding these two manufacturing of materials.

We thought a player like HLE in the merged form is on the forefront of supplying those critical equipment for this company, for this industry to grow. And that is where there was a time period then in 2019, there was a three years kind of waiting period. That waiting period increased to four, four and a half years in 2021. So the capability they were building, still they could not completely fulfill the needs of the consumer.

And that is where Malabar kind of funds came into. Other funds came into when the company’s market cap fell to 3,000, 4,000 crores and it went to almost 8,000, 9,000 crores. And the capability of Alab as an engineer was something which drove me to take that bet. And that mindset created an organization which is one of the largest value creators if you think about in terms of a merger story that Indian corporate had ever spun.

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: So you invested in this company when it was valued at 100 crores and today it is sitting at a valuation of 8,000 crores?

ARVIND KOTHARI: At the top it went to around 8,000 crores. Today it might be around 4,000 crores.

The Investment Framework

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: Okay, got it. So sir, if I have to break down your framework, you first look at a megatrend, something like, let’s say PM Suryaghar Yojana, which is going to substantially increase the demand for a particular capability in India. Correct. So it could be about solar panels or it could be about glass lining equipment.

Once you identify that, you go and scout for entrepreneurs or companies who have the capability to service this demand. And once you identify them, then you get into a framework, then there is another framework which then goes deeper from the entrepreneur all the way to the culture of the company, to the integrity of the company, to the energy of the people who are running the company.

And on the basis of that you decide to invest in a particular company, not on the basis of the numbers but on the basis of the capability of the company to cater to a future demand. And that is where you’ve been able to experience hockey stick growth. Is that correct?

ARVIND KOTHARI: Yes. Because if I’m betting on the numbers which are already there, why will the market reward me anything? Because if I’m already betting on a giant like Reliance which has already created thousands of crores of profitability, it will not move the needle if they create few thousand more crores of profitability because they’ve already been discovered by the market.

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: Got it. Give me two more examples, sir.

Case Study: Waaree Energies

ARVIND KOTHARI: So the second company that we bet on is Waaree Energies which again if you think of, and we were thinking about that bet, it was in solar where India had no chance to succeed, right? China was the leader in that sector. And China was in a way dominating this space. Almost 90% of the equipment world over were Chinese equipment.

And when the idea came to us, everyone again started, including Vivekji. First call, he was saying, “We buy panels in Microsoft, protect from Waaree and all these players, commodities and why commodities should get any value.” But what we observed is that here’s an entrepreneur who survived in an industry which was dominated by China, had no profitability or close to zero profitability. He himself went on the verge of getting drained of all his resources in the company twice.

And he sold some other business of his that he had in engineering wall business which he sold to a European counterpart and brought capital to this company to make it survive. That is a passion that he carried for this business. And in COVID we remember that all the Chinese people had a force majeure clause on supplying to us panels to the US because the shipping cost just went through the roof. So everyone said we are not supplying.

Here is a small company from India living up to the contracts and saying, “Forget about force majeure, forget about the losses I am going to supply, whatever loss, every container that I’m making.” And that is where he stood and delivered which no other company either in India or China delivered. And that is where he won the trust of the US counterparts.

And this cannot be captured in numbers, right? Because when you talk about the US demand, there were a lot of Indian engineers who were there which were working in these EPC companies who were placing orders. They did not have a proper alternative to China for all these years. And hence they were not putting these orders and when we talk to them.

So the main ingredient over here is generally investors don’t take stock of the situation on ground and what is it changing as a trend for the future.

VIVEK JAIN: And also to add on the Waaree piece is what’s very important, Dharmeshji’s capital allocation and his time of equity raising was very particular because this was an industry not having profits. And that time, if you have a lot of debt on your book, you can be screwed. He was raising the equity in the right time and also doing the allocation at the right time.

As investors generally we miss that. We just see numbers. Boss, understand the space, go talk to the founder, go talk to the market what’s happening and see if the situation is not improving for one year also, is there any problem? If the company can survive that tough time then the good times will come, then it will flourish. And this has happened in Waaree, right? This is happening in Kimbal now, right?

ARVIND KOTHARI: And the ability that Vivekji is talking about, Hitesh Bhai raised capital of around 1,000 crores without any investment banker being appointed, without even a rupee of investment banking fees being paid. We raised close to around 180 crores in the company in two rounds. And when I just reached out to one of the family members that we raised this amount, we’re very happy with the investment. But if there can be a fees.

So the feedback that I got, “We are not charging any fees.” I told, “Why will you charge a fees? You need to pay a fees to us to basically raising this capital.” But we were happy with the investment.

AYUSH SINHAL: We did not make any money on the fees.

ARVIND KOTHARI: But the investment was such superb that we were very excited and we went ahead. The point is that he was very clear that “I don’t want these kind of term sheets being written by these big investors and try to dominate of how I want to build my business. I have spent almost two decades understanding this business. I don’t want a third party to come and explain me that why are you making losses on this container that you’re shipping out to the US” because he was building a relationship.

He was building a relationship which was going to last. And the point is that relationship helped him to have close to $1 billion in advances to build factories which now is around 14 gigawatts which is going to go to 20 gigawatts just in a year’s time. And the starting point was just a 500 megawatt factory to this 20 gigawatt factory spread across US, India.

No other giant like Adani could even fathom doing that. And that is where he started to serve the US market. That was our thesis. India market was commodity and Waaree at least will make money out of that from things turning the table and India policy then going live and ALM ticking in where Indian government told that, completely changing the India business for them.

So point is that betting on right things gave unimaginable opportunity in India itself. And now India is talking about energy storage and Waaree is talking about energy storage. India is talking about green hydrogen, Waaree is talking about green hydrogen. So they have transformers, everything. In fact, that is a beauty about these great founders. Again that I am repeating in the sake of it, but that is the building blocks that they find adjacencies and are able to replicate the same success in the other adjacencies.

VIVEK JAIN: And also leave money on the table. Yeah, all these founders like Hiteshji and even Kimbal, they have always left money on the table for the investors. This is also crucial because if the founder is only thinking that “I should have the whole piece of the cake,” then the investors of course will not back them, right. Hiteshji and Kimbal of course have been doing that, right. And we have seen other founders also who have been quite successful that they have to take everybody along in the growth story. That is also important.

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: You entered Waaree at a market cap of 4,500 crores and today it is sitting at a market cap of 80,000 crores. So that’s almost a 20x return. That’s insane. And the last company, sir, the third?

The Power of Long-Term Thinking in Investment

ARVIND KOTHARI: Company, or I can say again an ecosystem, again with the same mindset that we bet on was the electronic manufacturing in the country where there are multiple companies that we bet. But again, China is the leader over there. We cannot compete with China and the other southeastern nations and we don’t have an ecosystem, some things like that.

But if you look at the Indian imports, the second item after oil was electronics. And that is where the government was framing policies that how we can become a self-sustaining nation in electronics.

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: How much was the return that you generated from this?

ARVIND KOTHARI: So Aventel would be at what, 2000% up for us. Maybe HBL was 700% up for us. That’s a kind of multiplier that we’ve made. But we’ve been lucky that these companies delivered what we thought and delivered much more than we thought.

See, I did not imagine that Kimbal would be doing an EMS so successfully or would be executing so successfully or a 2000 crore kind of a business in a single year. It’s something very unique that they’ve built. Maybe something very unique that the order book that came to worry or HBL getting Kavach orders. This was something which we just hoped and some things we didn’t even hope came out of the blue.

But betting on the right set of people and the right set of sector was something at a valuation gave us a lot of returns.

Key Investment Advice for Multi-Bagger Returns

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: Got it. Sir, if you were to sum up your entire thesis and give out one takeaway to all the investors who are looking for these multi-baggers, what would your research advice be?

ARVIND KOTHARI: So I have always thought through that. We’ve discussed this with my team also that what is our thesis, what do we bet on and how do we come across this serendipity where we come across companies like Kimbal or Worry. And what we figured out that thinking long term and focusing on creating relationships for the long term is one thing that has helped us a lot.

We are never focused in a very myopic way to think at a relationship and approach someone with what profits we are going to make in a quarter or this year or that year. But the most value add has been from relationships like these. And that’s how we started to back companies together.

And that’s what equity investors today are just focusing on what the listed world is. And they will just go to a company and look at the revenue projection this and then invest. They don’t go behind the story. Going behind the story is where entrepreneurs come into picture where a leader in the space can guide you towards that, how he thinks about the business or some supplier or some value chain guy can tell you about what the credibility of that person is.

And that we use a lot in the entrepreneur circle that we’ve built to frame that whether this company has a good future, has good relationships, has good ethics and has good culture or not, which in a way very few. If you look at any research note which is spanned out by, I mean you have 200 companies in India who do wealth management or there are maybe 500 brokers, all brokerage reports talk about this is the current market price, this is our target.

I mean I in my journey have never been able to figure out how I can decide a target of a company because I just enter into from that learning experience that how this business is right now, what it can become few years down the line. And there’s a journey that we are going together with no target in mind.

And that is what I guess investors should always look at: thinking long term, not having targets in mind, enjoying the journey and trying to figure out what they’re betting on, whom they’re betting on is the right person or not. And that has been again a theory that we have been being with Kimbal, being able to learn even more.

That’s why I’m saying both side of the table have value added us a lot. Because before Kimbal we just used to think that we are in the right direction or not. After Kimbal we get this validation that yes, thinking about these things do matter. These are the things that we need to now incorporate more in our thesis when we are picking the next investment because we are wanting to add more value rather than just money. Betting on just stock prices is not what we want to stand for.

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: Got it.

ARVIND KOTHARI: That is what as a learning outcome I believe investors or even youngsters can have when they’re thinking about business relationships, about investing, about anything in their life. Thinking long term is one thing that I’ve learned from Buffett and Munger and which is a learning lesson for my life that I keep on wanting to explore more.

Addressing the Smart Meter Controversy

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: Understood. Ayush, the last question that I want to ask you is about the controversy about smart meters. And Teju just told me that there are people in Gujarat complaining that their bill was about 6,000 rupees and now it’s suddenly jumping up to 60,000 rupees. So that’s wild, right? And that defeats the purpose of having a smart meter which is to measure the power consumption accurately. So how do you respond to that?

AYUSH SINHAL: See, couple of things. One, such a mass rollout of smart metering or a replacement drivers never happened in the world ever, right? In India we’re replacing 150,000 smart meters daily. So definitely there has been lot of challenges, there have been a lot of mistakes and every entity in this particular, every stakeholder in this particular game has learned from that. And today the solution has matured.

Earlier there were so many cases that you were getting energy bill of different consumer. So there’s a meter number, there’s a serial number like 1, 2, 3 and your consumer number. Every accounting happens, every energy billing happens on your consumer number. Whereas the meter is sending data on 1, 2, 3 if the mapping is wrong. So you’ll be getting the energy bill of some other consumers and some other consumer will be getting a from someone else, right.

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: So you think that the systems will get better with time.

AYUSH SINHAL: Yes, the system is getting better with time.

VIVEK JAIN: Right.

AYUSH SINHAL: So the example that you’re giving us in Gujarat, what has happened initially was they as soon as the smart metering was implemented, they had added all the errors, all the previous undue charges into the smart metering account. At the first go itself, if you’re not able to pay that, then your electricity gets disconnected.

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: Got it.

AYUSH SINHAL: So that, and it was just for around 1% or 2% of the consumer. But that 1% or 2% of the consumer spreads like anything, that message spreads like anything that after installing the smart meter, the bill inflates. Whereas the measurement is far better than previous one, so it is way more accurate, is way more secure.

Final Words of Wisdom for Investors

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: Understood. Vivek sir, do you have a final word to give out to the investors?

VIVEK JAIN: Yeah. So in my learning and my experience, I’m sharing from the experience that you have to be patient. You have to look at the right space and be with the entrepreneur for some time. Give him the space.

Any business has a sine wave kind of thing. It can go up and go down. Just do not see, okay, this quarter is bad, let’s exit. And also when an equity investor is listening to the con calls because a smaller investor may not have the ability to connect to the founder but he’s listening to con calls. Understand the tone behind it.

The tone changes a lot as the company progresses. And if you’re right in there, you will make a hell lot of money. And as we told in the earlier thing also that money is the byproduct. The process should be right. Which is about the Gita also. Gita also talks about the same thing. Focus on the process, results will follow you. That’s what I believe.

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: Thank you so much, sir.

ARVIND KOTHARI: So.

Recap and Key Takeaways

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: Here’s a summary of our discussion today. Firstly, Arvind sir, you mentioned that we have three problems in India. Firstly, in spite of being the fifth largest producer of coal for the longest time we had been importing coal. Secondly, we also have T&D losses, transmission and distribution losses because of which we are losing out on a lot of money.

And Ayush, you gave out a very simple analogy where you said that it’s almost like having a pipe full of water but having a massive leakage in between because of which you’re losing out on water and you’re suffering because of lack of water. That’s exactly what’s happening to India. And you mentioned we are losing 2% of our GDP worth of money into just T&D losses and energy losses which can be solved for.

And lastly we spoke about the broken grid infrastructure. It’s broken because nobody anticipated the consumption of energy to go up so quickly. And because we are such a huge country, this is something that needs to be fixed. And the evolution is happening very, very quickly.

Then we spoke about the supply chain of how power is produced and distributed. Where we spoke about how coal is sourced by Coal India then goes to power generation companies, then goes to power transmission companies, then goes to power distribution companies or discoms and then goes to the traders like Adani Power and Tata Power who then bring power to the households of India, to the industries of India.

And here’s where we spoke about the inefficiency. The major inefficiency lies with the discoms because they’re incurring thousands of crores of losses. And one of the biggest reasons for that was T&D losses. And that is where you found an opportunity with smart meters.

Like you mentioned, you are a usual hostile kid who did not bother to pay electricity bills, found a gap in the market, discovered that manually discoms had to send somebody to check the reading of your meter, find out if you paid the electricity bill or not. And they were being paid 10 rupees per meter which was nothing for doing something so tedious.

And that is where you realized that there must be a smarter way to collect this data and fix this leakage in such a way that you can figure out how much power is being consumed, you can regulate the power consumption and most importantly, you can make this entire process efficient where if somebody is not paying the electricity bill, you can cut off the supply without practically sending someone all the way to your house. And that is where you found the opportunity with smart meters.

The Solar Revolution and Smart Meters

And what we also discussed, Arvind sir, is about the rise of solar. After PM Suryaghar Yojana, the solar revolution in India has picked up and that has also given an opportunity for the smart meter market. Because now we are transitioning from a grid infrastructure where electricity comes from one source to the households to another model where households themselves are producing electricity.

Which means there’s a two way transmission that’s happening. If two way transmission has to happen, it cannot operate with the existing meters. You need smart meters which can measure the inflow and outflow of power which is again turning into an advantage for a company like Kimbal.

We spoke about two emerging opportunities over here. One is in the battery space and the other is in the smart meter space where Vivek ji, you mentioned that power is perishable. If you don’t find a way to store it, it’ll be of no use to you in some time. So there’ll be a huge demand for batteries and there’ll be a huge demand for smart meters because India will require 500 million smart meters by 2030.

And one of the reasons why the solar revolution has picked up so quickly is because Arvind sir, you mentioned that from 2009 to 2025, the cost of producing power via solar has gone down from 21 rupees per unit to 1.6 rupees per unit at the same time because the power consumption in India has shot up and the grid is not able to take it up.

Solar becomes the perfect energy source to be able to generate power in a decentralized manner so that we can cater to the demand of the Indian consumers. At the same time we can make sure that our existing infrastructure does not break. And that’s where we spoke about the next hundred villages in India that could be electrified because of a decentralized solar grid that could power those particular villages.

Smart Meters vs Traditional Meters

And then we spoke about the difference between a smart meter and a dumb meter. Ayush, you mentioned that smart meter can help you with three things: regulation, calculation and efficiency. If that is done then the discoms will largely benefit because the T&D losses can go down. We can figure out where the leakage is happening and we can go and fix it.

And because you have a full stack service all the way from product to the data analysis, you are helping discoms and large companies figure out where the leakage is so that they can fix it. More importantly, you’ve done that inefficient process of just going and looking at every meter and reading them into an efficient process which looks very simple on the outside. But I’m sure it must be very, very difficult where you helped these companies figure out the people who are not paying electricity bills just like yourself and you help them get rid of this.

And that’s why you also mentioned the cases in Gujarat, right where if the bill comes out to be 60,000, that’s not because the smart meter is not working. That could also be because the bill that they’ve got is a compilation of all the other unpaid bills that were left out which have now come in submission to look like an exorbitant bill of 60,000 rupees.

Investment Thesis and Stock Picking Strategy

Then Arvind sir, we spoke about your investment thesis and how you pick winning stocks. You’ve been able to generate 2000% return and 700% return which on the outset seems like a bet gone right. But you walked us through an in depth process of how you pick these companies.

And that’s where we spoke about a model where you look at a megatrend, for example the PM Suryaghar Yojana, you look at the future demand that is going to occur because of that megatrend. In this case it could be the increase in demand for solar panels. And then you go and scout for companies which have the capability to cater to that future demand.

Those companies may not be doing well today, but in the coming decade they will become beneficiaries of the megatrend. Eventually they’ll go on to become super profitable companies. As a result, they will deliver returns for you. So you don’t study the numbers. You study the story behind the numbers. You study the market and how conducive it’s going to get in the future so that it can benefit a certain cohort of companies.

And that’s why we spoke about Waaree, we spoke about Kimbal. And after finding these companies, you look for energy, integrity and agility. And if the culture of the company is insanely good, if the founder has infectious enthusiasm to solve their problem, then you bet on those companies, you stick with them.

And that’s where you get people like Vivek ji who can mentor these companies in such a way that they can accelerate the progress of these companies to then fit your thesis of they becoming a beneficiary of the megatrend.

Final Takeaways

From Ayush, I would say the most important takeaway is to look for the smallest gaps that you can identify in your life. Because those gaps may appear to be very small to you, but at scale there could be billion dollar gaps which if addressed can help you build large companies. Like you said, power seems to be a boring sector. But if enough people get into the space and solve for the existing problems in the space, there are several million dollar, billion dollar companies that could emerge because of addressing this gap.

From Arvind ji, the most important takeaway for me is to not study the numbers, but the story behind the numbers. And from Vivek ji, what I’ve understood is that you spoke about patient capital.

ARVIND KOTHARI: Right?

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: And that is something that very few people understand. Everybody speaks about patient capital but they don’t understand what patient capital means. We’re not talking about patience over a few quarters, but over a few decades which will help you become a beneficiary of the India growth story.

And you gave very good examples of Waaree Energy as well as Kimbal where you stuck to the company for a very long time to then see it progress and not just see it as a transaction where you just simply invest money and hope that in the next three months your money will double. Basically double, but 2000%, 700% return. So don’t just look at the numbers, but study the story behind the numbers. Does that sum up our conversation, guys?

AYUSH SINHAL: Perfect.

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: Yes, perfect. Thank you so much, guys.

VIVEK JAIN: Thank you.

ARVIND KOTHARI: Thank you so much.

GANESHPRASAD SRIDHARAN: Thank you.

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