IT WAS IN 1994, when Girish Tanti was close to completing his MBA in the U.K. that his older brother, the late Tulsi Tanti, made a call from Gujarat to the 24-year-old: “We’re looking at renewable energy [as a business]. Wind seems interesting. Why don’t you look at this as an area of focus?” Though the Tantis ran a textile business, Tulsi was thinking about something different.

What was to be Girish’s MBA thesis — setting up a wind energy business in India — was now a real business pivot. When Tulsi came over to the U.K., the duo travelled across Europe, the U.K., and the U.S. before zeroing in on Germany as the learning base for the new business. By April 1995, the thesis was abandoned, but the idea, Suzlon Energy, came to life.

Thirty years on, Suzlon is embarking on a new strategy that will redefine how the company will play India’s renewable energy game.

FROM BOOM TO BUST, AND BACK

Suzlon’s first act was spectacular. In the early 2000s, when the world suddenly decided renewable energy mattered, Suzlon was ready. The company expanded globally. Built factories. Shipped turbines to Denmark, Germany, Australia, and the U.S.

Then the financial crisis hit in 2008. The global wind market froze overnight. By 2009, the company was close to shutting down. But Tulsi did not give up. He sold assets and worked towards reducing debt. In November 2009, Suzlon sold 35% of Hansen, its Belgian gearbox manufacturing subsidiary, for $370 million to manage its debt. In January 2011, Suzlon got a $1.28-billion order to build wind energy projects. By May 2011, the company was making profits again.

But the recovery was fragile.

By 2015, the debt burden had become crushing at over ₹15,000 crore. But the company executed a corporate debt restructuring plan and sold its European subsidiary Senvion. Dilip Shanghvi, founder of Sun Pharmaceuticals, came in as the white knight, pumping in ₹1,800 crore for a 23% stake. This gave Suzlon some relief.

The subsequent five years were, however, challenging as the net worth by FY20 was negative at over ₹10,000 crore with debt still at over ₹13,000 crore. Sales remained weak. The company barely broke even.

Then, in March 2022, Tulsi Tanti passed away suddenly due to a cardiac arrest.

Within weeks, Vinod, chairman and managing director, and Girish, co-founder and vice chairman, made a surprising decision. Instead of consolidating and playing it safe, they embarked on a radical transformation with financial discipline at its core. Suzlon reduced leverage by restructuring its debt and raised money through a rights issue.

Aided by a stronger industry tailwind, the efforts paid off.

For the first time since FY15, net worth turned positive in FY23 as the company swung into the black with ₹2,849 crore in profit. Four years after Tulsi’s death, the turnaround is complete. The company is debt free with a market cap of over ₹66,000 crore and net worth sitting pretty at ₹9,500 crore.

Girish Tanti tells Fortune India: “The biggest learning for us has been that irrespective of how strong your strategy is, the environment can hit you anyway. How you build resilience to the changing market dynamics is very critical because you can control your destiny with your own actions, but the environment may just take the wind out of your strategy.”

In fact, Shanghvi had commended the family in 2023 following the termination of his eight-year association with Suzlon and the Tanti family: “We support the management’s plan to aggressively grow the business as well as their efforts towards regaining market share. The company has seen a turnaround under a challenging environment, which is a positive sign.”

After having spent the past three years in strengthening its balance sheet, the management is now ready for ‘Suzlon 2.0’ that positions the company from a wind equipment-EPC-O&M provider into a wind-first, full-stack renewable energy solutions house — covering development, equipment, EPC and O&M. “For the first time across the world and in India too, demand for electricity is going very strong. From that point, the solution of wind and solar combined with battery is becoming one of the most viable and sensible ways to power economies going forward,” says Girish.

The company has demonstrated strong execution thus far with wind installations increasing nearly 5x. With an order book of 5,892 MW, that’s 2.4x FY26 revenues. The company has kept execution rates close to 50% over the past two years. Against this backdrop, 2.0 is not a moon-shot but a strategy that builds on Suzlon’s strength. “The framework is sound and a strong order-book lends near-term comfort while the company builds a base for the next leg of growth,” mentions Mohit Kumar, lead analyst at ICICI Securities.

The only difference this time around is that the transition will be managed not by the family but by a professional management team led by Ajay Kapur — a man who led one of India’s biggest cement titans — as the group CEO, besides another industry veteran Ashok Ramachandran, former COO of JSW Energy, as president of the India business.

OLD HANDS, NEW BUSINESS

Kapur has spent nearly three decades at Ambuja Cements, 26 of them in leadership. He built his entire career there, working his way up from junior positions to eventually become MD and CEO. By the time he left in 2019, Ambuja was the gold standard of Indian cement companies.

During his two-and-a-half years at Vedanta, besides running the aluminium and power division, he also managed 8 GW of power assets and teams of 25,000 people. The division had a top line of $5 billion. He proved he could operate massive, complex industrial assets outside of cement. “In every meeting, the zinc guys were treated on a golden platter, as we [aluminium business] were losing money. I turned around the business into a profitable one, and today it makes more money than zinc,” Kapur tells Fortune India.

In 2022, Gautam Adani came calling. Adani was acquiring ACC and Ambuja, the company Kapur had spent his life building. “Gautambhai invited me when he was acquiring Holcim. I did my roadshow with all the promoters there, and by the time I came back, I had a letter to join. Even though I had two other very good options at that time which would have made me work less, I went for Ambuja because if such a big promoter was taking it, it’s my time to give back my best to the company where I had begun my journey at 1 million tonnes (MT),” reveals Kapur. In the three-and-a-half years that followed, under his leadership and in partnership with Adani, Kapur scaled the business to 108 MT.

That’s when the Tantis came calling. “While I built the nation through cement, I also made a lot of CO2… created pollution. So, I felt it is time to wash those sins through green energy,” says Kapur on why he made the switch.

But Kapur took his time.

He had been in enough boardrooms to know that good intentions don’t build companies. Execution does. He did his homework: read analyst reports, spoke to people in the industry. “Tulsibhai built Suzlon against the tide. Everything they’ve done was against convention. I just wanted to see whether the company is adequately capitalised and has the right bandwidth,” reveals Kapur.

What he found was impressive. There was J.P. Chalasani, a deeply respected figure who had spent decades in the industry, now a member of Suzlon’s group executive council. The hiring of Ashok Ramachandran as president of the India business was also a turning point. Ramachandran had spent most of his career with Schindler Group, running operations across India and South Asia. But his recent role was at JSW Energy, where as the chief operating officer he had done something remarkable: in three years, he had helped scale the company from 5 GW to 30 GW.

That expertise is what the promoters are banking on for the new journey.

FAST FORWARD

Land, right of way, and connectivity often lead to renewable project delays. A developer would secure land. Then they’d get a power purchase agreement with a customer. But they’d still need transmission connections, equipment, and environmental clearances. By the time they had all the pieces, the timeline had stretched impossibly.

“When you look at the challenges customers are facing, the one everybody is facing is that they can’t scale up at the pace they want. There are more funds available for deployment for renewable energy today in our country, but there are limited projects for getting it on stream,” says Girish.

He was clear about what the customer needed. “First and foremost, the problem is speed, and second is scale. The third problem they are facing is predictability and certainty. Can I do this? By when can I do it? How will I do it? What are the risks associated with that and how to manage those?”

“In renewables, you need to have a combination of wind, solar, and storage coming together. We are solving that issue. We are saying: ‘we are your one-stop shop. We will do it for you.’ We will integrate everything and put that together for you,” says Girish. The second pillar is development company (DevCo). Suzlon had been doing project development for wind customers since the beginning and 28% of its current order book is development.

“Typically, in the current model, what’s happening is, people are securing their PPAs first, then they try to find the sites and the equipment to build it together. Right there, you start with a wrong timeline, because you will always end up late to the commissioning side,” explains Girish.

The solution was to decouple development from execution.

Currently, Suzlon has 20 GW of assets in various stages of development. Of those, 8 GW were mature enough to close deals immediately. And here’s what works to Suzlon’s advantage: a good wind site can accommodate solar panels. “At most wind sites, you can also put solar. But conversely, not all solar sites can accommodate wind installations. So, technically, the pipeline which we have, we can quickly convert to an FDRE (firm and dispatchable renewable energy) pipeline. And now we are able to provide a solution for a customer that not just for wind, but wind, solar, storage, we will do the co-development for them,” says Girish.

The third pillar is the EPC business — engineering, procurement, construction. Suzlon already did this for wind. Now they’d expand it to solar, to batteries, and to anything renewable. “We have the expertise, so that effectively means customers don’t have to onboard with many parties. This is very unique to Suzlon. The size and scale and availability across nine states, nobody has that in the country,” explains Kapur.

The fourth pillar is asset management. Suzlon manages 18 GW of wind assets across India and has 101 clusters of wind installations across nine states.

While the margins on wind maintenance are exceptional, solar and battery would be different. Kapur explains the economics: “Wind business today makes 40% margin. As we go solar, we go to BESS [battery energy storage systems], we won’t get that kind of margin, but we will still make 15-20% in those areas if we do it smartly,” adds Kapur.

The key is efficiency. Fixed costs won’t go up because the company will focus on the states where it has assets and offices. Put it together and Suzlon could tell a customer something no other company in India could say. “My customer has an opportunity to enter in co-development at any stage. They take the risk and come early with me but don’t have to manage it, I do. They are just funding,” says Girish.

Analysts believe the 2.0 strategy will play out well.

Shweta Dikshit, analyst at Systematix, sees it as a key competitive advantage. The renewable DevCo integrates upstream by securing land and grid connectivity before project execution, and reduces project delays. “Project execution cycle is reduced from 2-3 years to 15-18 months, improving speed and capital efficiency,” points out Dikshit.

Kumar of ICICI Securities mentions that Suzlon’s diversification and ambitious targets point to a need for seamless execution. “Nonetheless, it is not looking at capex-heavy diversification. It plans to keep the solar piece asset-light through partnerships; whereas, for storage, it is planning to set up a 3-GWh battery assembly unit,” states Kumar.

THE HEADWIND

But beneath the headlines and the projections, there are questions about whether the ambition can be executed without the company repeating the mistakes that nearly killed it a decade ago.

The first is structural and beyond Suzlon’s control: the grid.

India currently has 56 GW of installed wind capacity and is aiming for 100 GW by 2030, which means 13-15 GW additions every year. Rajasthan alone has 284 GW of untapped wind potential, followed by Gujarat at 181 GW. While resources exist, transmission infrastructure is lagging.

Around 50 GW of renewable capacity sits stranded across India: built but unable to evacuate electricity because transmission infrastructure has not kept pace. The mismatch is structural: variable renewable projects can be commissioned in a year or so, while the transmission lines and substations to carry the output take far longer to plan, clear and build.

As a pure turbine maker, the company is paid on commissioning, and the downstream developer carries the evacuation risk. As a developer — what RE DevCo makes it — Suzlon must commit working capital to land, approvals and grid connectivity before a committed buyer is in place.

Kapur is frank about the constraint but is confident that the story will change. “We will almost have a near-continuous commissioning of transmission lines in the next 24 to 36 months. By 2030, when we look at the transmission build-out and the demand which is there, there’s so much focus in the coming three years.” The strategy is to sidestep the bottleneck rather than solve it. “DevCo is the answer for year three, four, five to smooth things out. That’s the value proposition we are going to customers today,” says Kapur.

The company's clearest hedge against all this was storage. A battery co-located with generation could time-shift output past the congested window instead of spilling it. Suzlon’s planned BESS facility is not diversification for its own sake but the piece that makes the full-stack model defensible against the evacuation gap.

The second headwind is the quality of the company’s cash.

Suzlon’s FY26 PAT of ₹3,153 crore includes ₹742 crore of deferred-tax-asset recognition, a non-cash accounting credit that reflects the management’s confidence in future taxable profits. Further, operating cash flow is ₹1,200 crore against an Ebitda of ₹3,000 crore in FY26, a conversion rate of nearly 40%. The gap is also on account of receivables build-up at over ₹6,000 crore, largely from public-sector contracts.

Kapur doesn’t deflect. “Our contracting strategy is good, but not the best. One of our KPIs is to further improve it so that it becomes customer-friendly, and, reduces the churn.”

He is also candid about the public-sector challenge. “Public sectors have their own requirements. You need to put up more security so your funds get locked. At the same time, pay you the price for it. So, the RoIs are not bad.”

But he is honest about the broader picture. “We are a very business-focussed EPC company. We have learnt over three decades, and each of the learnings is in every part of the contract. But to say that I am happy with everything we are doing, the answer is no. There’s a lot of room to improve.”

Suzlon has serviced much of its working capital through non-fund-based limits — bank guarantees and letters of credit that support EPC and PSU contracts but do not appear as drawn debt. But as the order-book tilts towards EPC, PSU customers, and a capital-hungry DevCo, the balance sheet will face three different risk types at once: payment risk, execution risk, and development risk, financed in a way that it does not show up as leverage.

This is where the past matters. Suzlon had nearly died twice because the management had lost discipline on capital deployment and debt accumulation. The company had learnt, the hard way, what happens when ambitions outrun the guardrails. CFO Rahul Jain acknowledges the concern: “There is a finite capital that we have committed to this. And it is not that I’m giving out the money today. I’m saying as the project comes through, we are willing to fund that finite capital.”

Today, the guardrails are much stronger. The company has created a six-stage gate process for project development. Each stage has specific compliance requirements. “Each stage gate has a compliance protocol. It drives accountability for closing sales deals. If you are not able to get visibility on the offtake, the next stage will not start. You will not take the exposure of investing more money in that,” adds Jain.

Beyond processes, the company is building sophisticated monitoring systems.“We have started a journey of setting up an enterprise risk management dashboard. We have it at a certain level. We are taking it to the next with a digital layer. Senior executives will have that. We want a live dashboard where both risks and reward opportunities are visible,” explains Girish.

BIGGER AND BETTER

Suzlon’s five-year plan is ambitious. From ₹16,679 crore in FY26, it is targeting a 25% revenue CAGR through FY31 and a rise in annual renewable energy sales from 2.5 GW in FY26 to 10 GW by FY31. The order-book is expected to grow from 5.5 GW to 15 GW, with assets under management rising from 18 GW to 70 GW.

Analysts are optimistic about the prospects. “With India’s wind installations set to enter a multi-year upcycle and hybrid renewable demand rising, Suzlon is transitioning from a turnaround story to a structural growth platform,” mentions analyst Piyush Pandey at Centrum Institutional Research. Systematix projects the firm will take DevCo’s market share to 60% by FY31 and raise its share in India’s wind OEM market to roughly 40%. Centrum expects similar numbers. Kumar of ICICI Securities believes Suzlon’s DevCo model will compress execution cycle to months from years: “We believe this could be a structural differentiator.”

Over three decades, the brothers have built an institution, and the journey has left a strong imprint. “During Suzlon 1.0, the renewable industry was a good-to-have business, but the market dynamics impacted us too much. Today, renewable is a must-have. But the current problem is different: the world is a much more volatile place. So, how do you build resilience becomes all the more dynamic than before,” says Girish.

Hence, when Girish speaks about Suzlon 2.0, it’s not blind optimism but clarity. “Customers want certainty. They want scale. Suzlon 2.0 is our answer to that, with the bedrock being our core wind business. The understanding is very clear that the overall delivery is his [Kapur] and he is empowered to deliver. Between the two [Kapur and the CFO] they have to take those calls, and are accountable to the stock market.”

The Tantis are not stepping back; it’s just that the ones writing the new thesis have their work cut out.