Azad Engineering

A report card that got it wrong

Rakesh Chopdar failed his Class 10 exams. He started working at 16. He never went to college.

If you stopped the story there, you'd file him under "didn't make it." India has a cruel habit of letting a teenage report card decide a life.

But in 2008, Chopdar set up a shed in Hyderabad with a single second-hand CNC machine and made a decision that sounds almost absurd given his résumé. He decided to make parts for jet engines.

The hardest manufacturing on Earth

Understand what that means. Jet-engine components spin at 10,000 RPM inside temperatures above 1,400°C. They are the parts where a deviation of a few microns — fractions of the width of a human hair — can bring down an aircraft.

This is arguably the most unforgiving manufacturing on the planet. And Chopdar arrived at it with no engineering degree, no aerospace pedigree, and no domestic supply chain to lean on.

What he did have was twelve years of learning metal by hand in his father's workshop, and a conviction that turns out to be true: precision has no prerequisite except mastery. A machine doesn't ask where you went to school. It only asks whether the part is right.

Earning the impossible certifications

The world did not roll out a welcome mat. Every global certification — AS9100D, NADCAP — had to be earned from scratch. Every customer relationship began with years of audits before anyone would issue a single purchase order. In aerospace, nobody takes a chance on you; you have to remove every reason to say no.

Then GE Aviation said yes.

Then Rolls-Royce. Then Pratt & Whitney. Then Honeywell. Then Siemens. One by one, the most demanding names in the business put a school dropout from Hyderabad on their supplier list.

The market reads the report card differently

In December 2023, Azad Engineering listed on the NSE at a market cap of around ₹5,500 crore, with FY25 revenue of ₹568 crore. Sachin Tendulkar came on as an investor.

And the market kept re-reading the story. By mid-2026, Azad's market capitalisation had climbed to roughly ₹13,300 crore — the kind of re-rating that happens when investors realise a company isn't just growing, it's nearly irreplaceable in a supply chain the whole world is trying to de-risk.

The Class 10 dropout had built one of India's most precise aerospace manufacturers.

Tell this to a kid with a bad result

Sometimes the report card gets it very, very wrong.

If you know a teenager crushed by a 10th or 12th-grade result, tell them this one. Not as a fairy tale — Chopdar's path was twelve years of metal under his fingernails and years of audits before a single order — but as proof that mastery is a door an exam can't lock.