Triveni Turbine’s 10-hectare factory complex in the Sompura industrial belt, about 48 kilometers northwest of India’s tech capital, Bengaluru, is a picturesque landscape of pink-and-yellow flowering shrubs and an abundance of mango, coconut and sapodilla trees. But the heart of this verdant campus is another green expanse—a gleaming, 10,000-square-meter shop floor churning out rotors and blades alongside assembly bays and test beds for steam turbines.

Powered by either fossil fuels or renewables such as biomass, these giant machines use steam to spin a rotor to generate electricity. The company specialises in turbines of up to 100 megawatts (MW), producing 300 to 350 machines a year at its two factories (the second is located in another Bengaluru suburb). They are deployed in an array of industries, such as cement, steel and chemicals as well as by independent power producers. (Bigger turbines of more than 100MW make up more than 90 percent of the global steam turbine market.)

Amid the steady hum of the factory, Nikhil Sawhney, the company’s vice chairman and managing director, reveals his ambitions: “In the next five years, we’ll more than double our revenue,” he says. “I don’t see why we can’t triple it also.” In the year ended March 31, Triveni’s revenue jumped 21 percent from the previous year to a record 20.1 billion rupees ($237 million) and net income rose by a third to 3.6 billion rupees, earning it a spot on the Best Under A Billion list of companies for the second year in a row.

Since getting involved with operations 14 years ago, this fourth-generation scion of a Delhi clan with roots in the sugar business has helped transform Triveni from a largely domestic outfit into a notable global player. Over that period, market cap has surged to $2.4 billion from $262 million and it now has 6,000 installed units in 80 countries, up from 2,500 in 30 markets in 2011. It is the No. 2 player in the global market in the up-to-100MW segment, after Siemens Energy, a spin-off of German giant Siemens, according to US-based energy intelligence firm McCoy Power Reports. “It’s been a journey based on a lot of focus and discipline,” the 48-year-old says.

But Sawhney still has speed bumps to navigate. The steam-turbine business is undergoing rapid change amid the transition to cleaner energy; competition is intense not just from Siemens but other multinational players, such as Brazil’s TGM Turbinas and the UK’s Baker Hughes; and the threat of tariffs is rattling his US expansion plans, making him acutely aware that he must keep innovating. “We need to develop new products and new technologies and create newer market segments all the time,” Sawhney says. “We are very paranoid as a company.”

Since going public in 2011, shares of Triveni have rocketed about 1,600 percent, propelling Sawhney’s father, Dhruv Sawhney, under whom the $1.8 billion fortune is listed, into the billionaire ranks, starting in 2022. The........

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