SHIV NADAR

Shiv Nadar was born in 1945 in Moolaipozhi, a small village in Tamil Nadu, India. He studied electrical and electronics engineering at PSG College of Technology in Coimbatore.

After graduating, he worked at a calculator company called DCM.

In 1976, Nadar and six partners pooled together 187,000 rupees (about $1,500 at the time) and founded Microcomp in a garage in New Delhi. The company initially made calculators for the Indian market.

That same year, they renamed it Hindustan Computers Limited, which became HCL. In 1978, HCL built one of India's first indigenous personal computers, the HCL 8C, at the same time as Apple was building the Apple II in California.

HCL grew into an IT services giant. In 1991, when India liberalized its economy, Nadar was perfectly positioned.

He spun off HCL Technologies as a separate IT services company in 1999. It went public and grew rapidly, serving Fortune 500 clients worldwide.

By 2024, HCL Technologies had $13 billion in annual revenue, 225,000 employees, and a market cap of over $60 billion. HCL is now the third-largest Indian IT company behind TCS and Infosys.

Nadar stepped down as chairman in 2022, handing the reins to his daughter Roshni Nadar Malhotra.

HCL Group (founder). HCL Technologies, HCL Infosystems, HCL Healthcare.

Shiv Nadar Foundation (education philanthropy). His daughter Roshni Nadar Malhotra is now chairperson of HCL Technologies.

Nadar is a technology operator who builds from zero. He does not buy companies to fix them.

He creates companies and grows them organically. HCL's growth was almost entirely through hiring engineers, winning contracts, and expanding capabilities rather than through massive acquisitions.

When he does invest, it is in long-horizon bets on technology trends. HCL was early to IT services outsourcing.

It was early to cloud computing. It made a controversial $1.8 billion deal in 2018 to acquire seven IBM software products, including Domino and Unica.

That deal was criticized as overpaying for legacy software but has since generated strong recurring revenue.

Spinning off HCL Technologies as a separate IT services company in 1999 and taking it public was the master stroke. That decision unlocked massive value by giving HCL Technologies the focus and capital to compete directly with Infosys and TCS.

The stock has returned over 10,000% since its IPO. The IBM software products acquisition in 2018 for $1.8 billion was also vindicated.

Those products generate over $2 billion in annual revenue now, paying for themselves in less than a year.

HCL Infosystems, the original hardware business, struggled to compete against Dell, HP, and Lenovo as the Indian PC market became globalized. Nadar held onto the hardware business too long, watching it shrink from a significant revenue contributor to almost irrelevant.

The lesson was clear. In tech, services scale globally.

Hardware commoditizes ruthlessly.

Build things that did not exist before. Nadar does not talk about returns or multiples.

He talks about creating capacity, opportunity, and knowledge. His financial philosophy is fundamentally about value creation rather than value extraction.

He believes technology is the greatest equalizer, and his investments in education through the Shiv Nadar Foundation reflect that belief.

His daughter Roshni Nadar Malhotra became chairperson of HCL Technologies in 2020, making her one of the most powerful businesswomen in India and the richest woman in the country. She is a graduate of Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management.

Nadar's wife Kiran Nadar is a prominent art collector and runs the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in Delhi.

Bachelor's degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from PSG College of Technology in Coimbatore. No overseas degree.

No MBA. He built one of India's largest technology companies with an undergraduate engineering degree and relentless execution.

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