Recognizing Sunil Kulkarni for his outstanding contribution to language tech and exceptional leadership that builds cross-cultural innovation and collaboration.
Pragati Leadership designs and delivers transformative learning and development journeys that create inspiring leaders and successful organizations. As pioneers in cultural transformation training and management leadership training, Pragati Leadership has been at the forefront of shaping leadership across industries. To further this mission, Pragati Leadership instituted The Inspiring and Successful Leadership Awards in 2022, celebrating outstanding leadership qualities and inspiring more individuals to imbibe them.
In September 2024, at the presentation ceremony of these prestigious awards, the ‘Exemplary Leader’ honor was conferred on Sunil Kulkarni, President of Fidel Softech, for his people-centric and cross-cultural approach that has helped him transform business. His leadership was recognized for several key contributions:
- Developing a unique company at the intersection of technology and language, building IT solutions with user interfaces in the languages required by users. Fidel is able to localize software in over 100 languages.
- His deep understanding of the Japanese market and language enabled Fidel Technologies to garner customers in Japan, where he leads a team of 50 employees.
- Leading Fidel to an IPO on the NSE SME Exchange in 2022, making it the first language tech company in India to go public. It is also the first IT and services SME with a specific focus on Japan-India to be listed.
- Mr. Kulkarni has set ambitious goals for the future, aiming to promote Japanese technology in India, increase the number of Japanese companies in India, and train thousands of Indians in Japanese language and technology.
A Journey of Cross-Cultural Innovation
Mr. Kulkarni accepted his award with gratitude and humility, thanking Pragati Leadership and all the jury members. He made it a point to thank his family and his entire team. He shared with the audience his early days as a Maharashtrian businessman! After he went to Japan in 1997, he learnt some great lessons in cross-cultural transformation, which helped him build a bridge between the two countries and he has since, continued to build relationships.
Lessons from Japan: Community and Language
One of the initial leadership lessons that Japan taught him was that everything had to be for the term and one had to be extremely community-focused and work towards nation-building. He was very impressed by the fact that Japan progressed without any compromise with its language and culture. This observation gave birth to the idea of ‘delivering the last mile’ in local languages. They commenced with Japanese but soon expanded to Indian languages. He gave the example of Amazon; if Alexa can be made to understand Telugu or Hyderabadi Hindi then they would have to create data-sets to train the AI engine of Amazon. They work with such companies to localize their product when they want to go global or ‘glocal’ as they say. Some companies want to go ‘global’ and some want to go ‘local’. Currently, they specialize in Japan because of their presence there but have now started focusing on the ASEAN and Middle Eastern markets.
Mr. Kulkarni feels that in India, the knowledge of English appears to be a pre-requisite to being considered literate but our ancestors were quite wise despite not knowing English. He’d like to take this concept forward by delivering technology solutions and services, both theirs and their clients, with the last mile delivery in local culture, local experience and local language. He felt this award was a testimony to his team’s efforts and the support of his family and clients who have given business to his company, all these years. Two years ago, the company went public and was listed on the NSE-SME Exchange. He invited the audience to invest in his company (ticker symbol Fidel Soft).
Sunil Kulkarni shared that the initial 15 years were spent navigating the business and only once they went public that they became serious about growing the company. They recently crossed the 200-crore market capitalisation mark and have their eyes set on the target of 500 crore market capitalisation. He concluded his speech by mentioning modestly that these are just numbers, whereas we want to contribute to the community and do nation-building.
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