PRESENTED BY ATUL CHAUHDARY

14040

EARLY LIFE

Kailash Katkar was born into a Maharashtrian family in a small village

at Rahimatpur, Maharashtra and grew up in Pune.
His father was a machine setter in electricals company Philips in Pune
and his mother was a homemaker.
In 1985, having barely managed to complete his matriculation, He took
up a job at a local radio and calculator repair shop in a bid to supplement
his Family Income.

ENTREPRENEURIAL CAREER

In 1990 Kailash Katkar finally decided to take an entrepreneurial jump

and started his own calculator repair shop with an initial seed capital of
Rs 15,000 from his savings, leased a small 100 sq ft office in Pune and
started a one-man venture.
In the first year he had a decent income of 45,000 in those times, but
was not really satisfied with the pace and the progress that he was
making.

He decided to upgrade his skills from Calculator repairing and started

reading and attending short computer courses around 1991-92.
Feeling confident enough, he decided to start his new venture known
as CAT Computer Services in 1993 while continuing with his
calculator repair shop.
In the first year of beginning he managed to generate a turnover of Rs
1 lakh.

 Around this time, his younger brother, Sanjay Katkar, who was studying
computer engineering in Pune, began writing software programs.
On his insistence, he started developing a basic model of antivirus
software for CAT Computer Services.
In those days, the people involved in computer maintenance faced this
problem and he realized that there would be plenty of takers for cheap
and simple computer security solutions.

 Nobody was willing to pay for it. So it was distributed free with the
computer AMC and also circulated it among their network of computer
service professionals
They suffered losses and the cash crunch affected their product
development and the process.
Even no bank was ready to support them.

At one point, in 1999, the business was in such a bad shape that they
considered shutting shop since they were not even in a position to pay
staff salaries.
Thankfully, they decided to delay the decision by a couple of months,
and during this period their hard work pulled them out of the red.
Today, the company employs 610 people and has 23 offices in India
and also have a presence in nearly 50 countries across the globe.

POINTS

Risk Taking abilities

Persistence
Hard work
Determined
Farsighted

AWARDS AND
ACHIEVEMENTS

Red Herring Asia

Business
Today's Best
Innovation SME
Award
CRN Channel
Champions
Award

Emerging India Award