Why are Sunil Singhania and Mukul Agrawal betting on a TV maker you've never heard of?

Quick question. Who made your TV?

If you said Samsung or Xiaomi or some brand you picked up in a Diwali sale, you might be only half right. The logo on the front is the brand's. But the circuit boards inside, the plastic cabinet around it and the metal sheet at the back could have come from a factory whose name you've never heard.

One such factory belongs to Ekkaa Electronics. And it has just filed papers for an IPO of up to ₹725 crore.

So what does Ekkaa actually do?

Think of it as a central kitchen. A dozen cloud-kitchen brands might sell you butter chicken under a dozen names, but the same kitchen cooks it all. Ekkaa is that kitchen, except it cooks TVs, washing machines, air coolers, speakers and induction cooktops.

The fancy term is ODM, or original design manufacturer. A brand walks in and says, "I want a 43-inch smart TV at this price." Ekkaa shows it a menu of ready designs, operating systems and specs. The brand picks one, tweaks it, slaps on its logo and sends the order. Samples arrive in about a week. Finished TVs roll out in 15 to 35 days.

That's the pitch: speed, flexibility and no need for the brand to build a factory of its own.

And it seems to be working. Revenue went from practically zero in FY24 to ₹497 crore in FY25 and ₹1,222 crore in FY26. Profit jumped from a ₹4 crore loss to ₹65 crore.

That's a hockey stick. And the thing about hockey sticks is that it's always worth checking how they were made.

Here's the thing. Ekkaa India only switched on its Noida plant in March 2024. So how does a company go from zero to ₹1,222 crore in two years?

Partly because it didn't really start from zero.

The promoters, the Gupta family, had been making TVs since 2019 through another company called Ekkaa Electronics Industries (EEIPL), with a factory in Sonipat. It crossed a million TVs in under two years. In FY25, EEIPL was also Ekkaa India's biggest customer, buying ₹104 crore worth of goods, and one of its biggest lenders.

Then in August 2025, Ekkaa India bought EEIPL from the promoters, paying mostly in its own shares. The Sonipat plant was wound down a few months later and its work moved to Noida.

In other words, some of the eye-popping growth is really one family company absorbing another. If you pretend the two were always one (which is what the DRHP's pro-forma numbers do), revenue grew from ₹434 crore to ₹709 crore to ₹1,263 crore. That's still a healthy 64% and 78%. Just not the 146% on the cover.

We don't know their names. Ekkaa says its top 10 are "known brands" who didn't consent to being named. What we do know is their shape:

• They're concentrated. The top three customers brought in 42% of FY26 revenue. The top 10 brought in 66%.

• But less so than before. A year earlier, the top 10 made up 80%.

• They're sticky. 55 customers have stuck around for over five years, counting the EEIPL years.

• And they're slow to pay. At March 2026, 53% of what customers owed Ekkaa was already past its due date, up from 37% a year earlier.

That last point tells you who has the upper hand. When three clients pay nearly half your bills, you don't chase them too hard.

Every good IPO story has a founder arc, and Ekkaa's is a proper family-business one.

The company is run by the Gupta family from Pitampura, Delhi. The patriarch, Chandra Prakash Gupta, 56, is the Chairman. Here's the remarkable bit: the DRHP plainly states he has no formal education. What he has instead is more than 13 years in the trenches of electronics manufacturing, and today he runs the part of the business where contract manufacturers live or die — supply chain and procurement. Remember, buying panels and components is 83% of Ekkaa's costs. The man negotiating those purchases built his expertise on the factory floor, not in a classroom. His wife Madhuri Gupta, 53, is an Executive Director overseeing overall management.

And then there's the face of the IPO: Sagar Gupta, all of 30 years old, the Managing Director. A commerce graduate from Shri Ram College of Commerce, he has spent over seven years in the business and runs business development and everything customer-facing, from pre-sales to after-sales. The division of labour is neat: the father makes sure a TV gets built cheap, the son makes sure someone's logo goes on it.

The family's track record backs the story. They started making TVs in 2019 through EEIPL in Sonipat and crossed a million units in under two years, per the DRHP. Then they built the far bigger Noida plant, brought in marquee investors, merged the two businesses and got the house IPO-ready, all before Sagar turned 31.

Skin in the game isn't a question here either. The promoters directly hold 61.8% of the company, with more sitting in family trusts. And the board has been dressed up for the public markets over the past year: two chartered accountants and other independent directors joined in 2026, and Motilal Oswal is running the IPO.

Now here's what got Dalal Street's attention. In the year before the IPO filing, two of India's most-tracked investors quietly bought into this unknown TV maker. And the prices they paid tell a story of their own.

Round one: September–October 2025. Ekkaa raised about ₹107 crore through Series A preference shares at an adjusted price of ₹105.25 per share. That valued the company at roughly ₹886 crore. The investor list reads like a who's who of Mumbai's HNI circuit, and the biggest cheque came from Mukul Agrawal, the investor behind Param Capital, who put in about ₹24 crore. Adjusted for later bonuses and splits, that bought him 22.7 lakh shares, a 2.7% stake. Other names on the list include Kaushik Daga (₹20 crore) and a string of family offices and broking firms.

Round two: July 2026. Just nine months later, Abakkus Four2eight Opportunities Fund, the fund house founded by Sunil Singhania, invested ₹100 crore at ₹182.63 per share. That's a 74% jump in price from the first round, and it valued Ekkaa at about ₹1,538 crore. Abakkus picked up 54.8 lakh shares, a 6.5% stake, making it the largest outside shareholder. It also got special rights, like a say in key decisions, that fall away once the company lists.

Now do the maths on what a ₹4,000 crore IPO would mean:

*Average cost per the DRHP. Two of the promoters are selling ₹200 crore worth of shares in the IPO's offer-for-sale.

Look at what happened between the two rounds. The price jumped 74% in about nine months, without a single share trading on an exchange. That tells you how quickly demand for this paper has been building in private markets. And these aren't passive punts either. Abakkus negotiated genuine investor protections, including rights over key company decisions, that stay in force until the listing.

When investors of this pedigree write ₹124 crore of cheques into an unlisted TV maker within a year, the market tends to sit up and take notice.

Now, you might wonder why brands would hand over manufacturing at all.

Simple. Building a TV factory is expensive, and TVs keep changing. One year everyone wants 32 inches, the next it's 55-inch QLED with Google TV. A brand that outsources can chase trends without sinking crores into machines that may be outdated in three years. And with the government nudging electronics makers to "Make in India," contract manufacturers like Dixon, Amber and PG Electroplast have become stock market darlings.

Ekkaa wants a seat at that table. And the table it cares about most is TVs.

According to the industry report in the DRHP, about 2.5 crore TVs were sold in India in FY25, and two-thirds of them were made by outsourced factories. The slice of that market that actually reaches manufacturers is worth about ₹16,440 crore, and it could nearly double to ₹32,180 crore by FY30.

Here's how Ekkaa's five product lines stack up:

See the pattern? TVs are 72% of Ekkaa's revenue, and Ekkaa already holds about 5% of that outsourced TV market. But don't dismiss the side bets. Take washing machines. The big brands, LG, Samsung and the rest, are busy chasing the premium end, the fully automatic machines that now make up 63% of the market. The value end, semi-automatic machines bought largely in Tier II and III towns, is increasingly the turf of regional and online brands. Those brands don't own factories. Ekkaa does, and its washing machine line ran at 73% capacity in FY26, its busiest line. Speakers are a ₹4,790 crore opportunity where soundbars pair naturally with the TVs Ekkaa already ships. Coolers are a fragmented market where an organised, low-cost manufacturer can consolidate share. Only induction cooktops are a genuinely small pond, with the entire outsourced market at ₹370 crore.

So make no mistake: this is a TV company. And its factories have room to grow. The Noida TV lines ran at about 56% capacity in FY26, on a single shift. Ekkaa can make a lot more TVs without buying a single new machine.

There's also talk of a new refrigerator plant near the Yamuna Expressway. But for now, Ekkaa has only filed its intent with the UP government. None of the IPO money is going towards it.

Okay, so how much does Ekkaa actually keep from each TV?

Not a lot. For every ₹100 of sales, about ₹83 goes into buying parts: display panels, chips, motors and plastic. After paying staff, electricity, freight and other overheads, Ekkaa is left with about ₹9 of operating profit (EBITDA). After interest, depreciation and tax, about ₹5 remains as net profit.

That's a thin margin. But here's the kicker: it's the best among its listed peers. Per the DRHP's comparison, Dixon's FY26 EBITDA margin was 5.3% (and just 3.9% a year earlier), Amber's was 8% and PG Electroplast's 8.4%, against Ekkaa's 9.4%. For the smallest player in the room to have the fattest margins is unusual, and it likely comes from the ODM model: when you design the product yourself and make your own cabinets and metal parts in-house, there's a little more of the pie left for you.

The real problem isn't the margin. It's the cash.

Picture this. Ekkaa pays a supplier for TV panels. About 76% of its parts are imported, so they take a while to arrive, and Ekkaa keeps a big stock just in case. Those parts sit in the warehouse, go through the assembly line and wait as finished TVs. Then a brand buys the TVs and pays about six weeks later. If it pays on time, that is.

All in, Ekkaa's cash stays locked up for about two months from the day it pays a supplier to the day a customer pays it back. And when you're growing fast, each month's bigger order locks up even more cash.

The result:

Read that again. Ekkaa has reported profits for two years but hasn't generated cash from its operations in any of the last three. Over three years, it has spent about ₹327 crore more than it brought in.

Who filled the gap? Mostly banks. Debt stood at ₹309 crore in March 2026 and rose to ₹396 crore by July. Pre-IPO investors chipped in another ₹106 crore.

In fairness, this is what fast growth looks like in manufacturing. Inventory and receivables balloon, and cash catches up later. The question is whether it ever does.

When a business runs on borrowed money, profit ratios can play tricks on you. So skip the flashy ones and look at return on capital employed, or ROCE. It asks a simple question: for every ₹100 put into this business, from lenders and shareholders combined, how much operating profit comes out?

For Ekkaa, the answer is ₹18. And the direction is what's interesting:

From nothing to 18% in two years, and already ahead of both Amber and PG Electroplast, whose returns have actually been sliding. Dixon's 45% shows what a mature, scaled-up version of this business can earn, and that's the gap Ekkaa is chasing.

Ekkaa's ROCE is from the DRHP; peer figures are from their respective annual reports.

What could close that gap? Three things, and all of them are already in motion.

One, the interest bill is set to shrink. Ekkaa paid ₹28 crore in finance costs in FY26, about a quarter of its operating profit. The IPO sets aside ₹225 crore to repay debt. Less debt, more of the operating profit flows through.

Two, the factories have room. Overall capacity utilisation was just 38% in FY26, on a single 8-hour shift. Sales can grow substantially before Ekkaa needs to spend big on new machines, and every extra TV on the same fixed cost base pushes returns higher.

Three, working capital gets funded. Another ₹150 crore of IPO money goes into working capital, replacing costly bank borrowing with shareholder money.

Zoom out, and the tailwinds are hard to miss.

India's outsourced manufacturing market for consumer durables is worth about ₹37,000 crore and is projected to grow to ₹65,500 crore by FY30. Within that, the ODM slice, where the manufacturer owns the design, is expected to compound at about 20% a year. Brands increasingly want to be marketers, not factory owners. The government wants electronics made in India. And Ekkaa sits in the middle of both trends with idle capacity, in-house design and a 450-strong customer list that grew its non-top-10 revenue four-fold in a single year.

The company is also stretching into new lanes: bigger washing machines, mini-LED TVs, blower coolers, possibly its own motors, and it has filed its intent with the UP government for a greenfield refrigerator plant near the Yamuna Expressway.

None of this is guaranteed, of course. The cash conversion has to catch up with the P&L, and the customer concentration has to keep falling. But if the FY25 to FY26 trajectory holds, this is a company worth keeping on your watchlist when the price band is announced.

So the next time you spot a suspiciously well-priced 43-inch smart TV online, take a closer look. There's a fair chance it began its life on an assembly line in Noida, in a factory built by a father with no degree and scaled by a son barely out of his twenties.

Until then...

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All figures are from Ekkaa Electronics' Draft Red Herring Prospectus dated September 24, 2026, converted to ₹ crore. Market sizes come from the Frost & Sullivan report in the DRHP, which Ekkaa commissioned. Pre-IPO valuations are implied from disclosed share prices and are our own estimates. This is not investment advice.