Wipro Bets Big on Partnerships, Acquisitions and Cloud
The company believes the IT sector is recession-proof and is therefore seeking to deepen its focus areas in the coming years
Wipro’s executive chairman Rishad Premji believes that the IT sector is recession-proof but that isn’t stopping him from betting big on hyper-scaler partnerships, inorganic growth through acquisitions and cloud initiatives as its main mantra for delivering growth in the coming years.
In a letter to stakeholders that is part of Wipro’s FY22 annual report, Rishad Premji says, “we are much more growth-obsessed than before, and are driving deep strategic partnerships with hyperscalers and increasing our focus on large deals.”
Recession-proofing does work
Coming to why he believes that the IT sector is recession proof, Premji believes that clients would either spend on business transformation or cost takeout. He is quite confident that this would be so, given that Wipro clients haven’t stopped or slowed down decision-making on deals and spending despite inflation and recession fears.
He made these observations at the 76th annual general meeting of the company on Tuesday and said while business transformation initiatives to enhance customer experience kicks in when the going is good, cost reductions become the mantra when things aren’t as good. He was at pains to point out that customers were taking decisions, unlike the time in 2008 when the global financial crisis had stymied the decision-making processes.
Cloud is at the core for Wipro
The executive chairman further wrote that cloud was at the core of Wipro’s transformation initiatives with significant headroom for growth. “We are investing $1 billion in Wipro FullStride Cloud Services over the next few years to deliver an orchestrated transformation to accelerate client business results,” he said.
Wipro FullStride Cloud Services is a collaboration between Wipro’s chief growth office and existing global business lines to create an integrated and comprehensive cloud transformation capability for customers, partners, and cloud experts.
Meanwhile, Thierry Delaporte, who took over as chief executive officer, said Wipro’s order pipeline had a robust outlook with addition of 45,000 employees reflecting this. “We expect technology investments to grow in the coming years as businesses continue to turn to cloud-based technologies and digital tools to enable an increasingly dispersed global workforce,” Delaporte said in the letter.
Over the past few weeks, India’s IT services sector has come under pressure with analysts perceiving a sharp fall in revenue growth to 12-13% during FY23 from 19% a year ago. Rating agency CRISIL believes this decline would be a result of IT expenditures being squeezed amid the inflationary headwinds in the United States and Europe.
