For Wipro’s billionaire Chairman Azim Premji, year 2017 was all about introducing a new brand identity for the company at a time when the IT sector was witnessing muted growth on account of geo-political issues, primarily visa related.
For the record, Wipro is the third-largest IT player in India. In the fiscal ended March ’17, its gross revenues grew 7.4 per cent. In his personal capacity, Premji’s net worth during the fiscal grew 21 per cent to Rs 102,533 crore from Rs 84,401 crore in 2016.
Premji, in Wipro’s latest annual report, touched upon the pervasive change that businesses are experiencing. “Over the last year, we saw further evidence of a drastic change in expectations and experiences of consumers and business models. Digital is the central element driving this change,” he said in a letter addressed to his stakeholders in the report.
“At Wipro, we strongly believe that our success will depend on our ability to redefine and align ourselves with the new global paradigms and the disruptive developments in our industry,” added Premji who turned the company from a small cooking fat venture in the late 1960’s to a $8.5 billion revenue group with businesses in IT, consulting and business process services with a presence in over 60 countries.
“Wipro has huge potential when it comes to transforming itself from an enterprise solution IT company to a platform-based IT solution provider,” says Deven R. Choksey, managing director at KR Choksey Investment Managers.
Wipro’s push for digital comes at a time when the entire IT sector has been making a transition from traditional IT services to digital services, thereby putting a lot of pressure on tier-1 companies to re-align their business models. All IT majors, from Infosys to TCS, are currently embracing the digital wave.