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Surendar Saluja, Chairman, Premier Energies
One slight regret of Surender Singh Saluja's is that he never worked as an employee. He claims that having the experience of working for a corporation in his early career would have been nice. But as luck would have it, right after he graduated with an engineering degree in 1969, he became an entrepreneur.
He began slowly with a few commercial ventures, but in 1995, when he began building a company to generate solar energy, he had no clue that the idea would make him a billionaire. His reasoning was simple: sunlight was renewable, abundant, and needed no raw materials.
About Premier Energies
Founded in 1995, Premier Energies is an integrated solar cell and solar module manufacturing company backed by GEF Capital, a private equity investor based in Washington, DC. The company, led by Chairman Surendar Singh Saluja & MD Chiranjeev Singh Saluja, is at the forefront of innovative technology, crafting high-tech photovoltaic products and solutions.
Life Post Partition for the Salujas
The Saluja family originally hails from Mirpur, which is now part of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. Surendar was barely a year old when the family moved to India during the Partition of 1947. They settled down in Ayodhya, where his maternal grandparents lived.
Within a year, Saluja's father and a buddy boarded a train to find a new job. He could have gone anywhere, and he had no specific destination in mind, but he ended up in Secunderabad, the city that the Saluja family now calls home.
“They came with an open mind. They had no one waiting for them here, but they saw that it was a beautiful place, a cantonment area, and decided to settle down,” said Surendar Saluja.
Under the License Raj, his father began producing peppermint and selling it to grocery stores and small vendors, riding his bicycle from store to store. He spent seven to eight years in that line of work. His father then began taking government contracts to secure and supply industrial goods.
Surendar graduated in mechanical engineering from Karnatak University, Dharwad, in 1969. To support young entrepreneurs, the Andhra Pradesh government at the time introduced a financing program.
To launch Saluja Auto Industries, Surendar took a loan of ₹2 lakh, "one lakh for capital expenditures and one lakh for working capital." The business sold high-tensile fasteners for turbines, cars, and other devices. After a few years, it was shut.
Soon after, he started a company called Premier Deep Well Hand Pumps in 1981 to sell pumps for rural drinking water supplies. They were linked to UNICEF (United Nations Children's Fund), which had started a campaign to provide access to drinking water in rural areas, and they exported to African nations.
He chose to launch Premier Energies during this period after learning about the potential of solar energy.“It was a one-man show,” said Saluja, who started with selling solar lanterns and graduated to building solar modules or panels manually.
“We were smoldering each module, each cell, manually. It used to take time, which is why initially we decided to buy from Central Electronics Limited (CEL) in Ghaziabad,” he said, adding that Premier was among the very few private players in the module manufacturing space in India.
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Setting Up Premier Energies
In 1995, when only a few people were aware of the potential of solar energy, Saluja founded Premier Energies in Hyderabad. He recalls how they demonstrated how a DC lamp might generate electricity by attaching it to a solar panel with two cables.
Beginning with simple goods like streetlights and solar lanterns, the company carried out projects that included setting up solar panels in remote areas without electricity. In 1999, they commenced solar module manufacturing.
When Surendar's son Chiranjeev joined Premier Energies in 1997, much of their business was still off-grid solar lanterns and lighting, and revenues were less than a crore per year. “I started my career on the machine, learnt how to make solar panels on a laminator,” he recalls.
Solar panel manufacturing was expensive at the time. Raw materials were also not cheap, and there were no volumes. According to Saluja, the first panel they produced sold for ₹200 per watt. They are now being sold for ₹14–16 per watt. “Everything was coming from China, even at that time,” he added.
Since then, the business has accomplished one milestone after another, like establishing a line of solar cells in 2011 and, most recently, extending its production capacity to the US. Telangana is home to five of their production sites.
The company’s solar cell manufacturing capacity stands at 2 GW (gigawatt), while module manufacturing capacity is at 4.13 GW. In FY24, they were the biggest exporters of solar cells to the US market and the second-largest manufacturer of integrated solar cells and modules in India, after Mundra Solar Energy of the Adani Group.
In 1999, when Premier Energies began producing solar panels, it was, in retrospect, one of their first steps towards backward integration across the value chain for solar manufacturing.
Taking the Company Public
One of Premier Energies' greatest advantages has been its early entry into solar energy, which helped the business when Saluja and his son Chiranjeev, the managing director, made the decision to go public earlier last year.
Chiranjeev has outlined an aggressive plan for capacity expansion to boost revenue growth in the upcoming quarters. This is the intended use of the money raised during the IPO.
He told Forbes India that despite its long history, Premier Energies is currently benefiting from its investments in expansion plans and technological advancements. Therefore, building the foundation to advance the solar photovoltaic value chain—on which China presently holds a domination of more than 80% - is a long-term plan.
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Making India China +1
The Indian government is currently pushing manufacturers to go farther up the value chain, which is associated with the significance of solar in India, with a target of 500 GW of non-fossil fuel capacity by 2030 and net zero by 2070.
In the long run, this will lower the cost of solar panel production in India and lessen reliance on imports from China.
“Today, 80% of polysilicon is made in China, and nearly 98% of ingot wafers for solar panels are made in China. That’s why the government wants to spur local manufacturing, starting with ingot wafers,” says Chiranjeev Saluja, Managing Director, Premier Energies.
Around 60% of India’s 500 GW target is going to come from solar, which means deployment of at least 50-60 GW year-on-year, he added.
“Demand is going to almost double in the coming years. Capacity is also coming up, but a lot of work needs to be done for backward integration. There are only two large manufacturing bases in the world focused on solar. One is China, and the other is India. So it’s a great opportunity for India to be China+1,” said Chiranjeev Saluja in an interview with Forbes India.
Revenue in FY25
The company's revenue increased by 140.6% from last year to ₹1,713 crore, while its EBITDA crossed the ₹500 crore mark, coming in at ₹513.7 crore.
In the base quarter, Premier Energies reported an EBITDA of ₹123 crore. The company's EBITDA margin increased to 30% from 17.3% last year. Its net profit for the period was ₹255.2 crore, helped by a jump in other income to ₹36 crore from ₹2 crore last year and a tax reversal of ₹21 crore.
Chiranjeev is confident that the business will keep going regardless of the direction the market takes. He claims that many people questioned if the business would last long enough when he used to give customers a 25-year warranty on their solar panels.
"We turn 30 next year and are among the few companies in this space that have survived the warranty period,” he told Forbes India last year.