Wipro

Timeline

1. 1945Western India Vegetable Products Limited is incorporated on 29 December in Amalner, Maharashtra, to make cooking oil.
2. 1946The company's shares are listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange.
3. 1966Azim Premji takes over as chairman at the age of 21 after the death of his father, Mohamed Hasham Premji.
4. 1977The company is renamed Wipro Products Limited.
5. 1981Wipro builds its first minicomputer based on the Intel 8086 chip, developed in a laboratory at the Indian Institute of Science.
6. 1982The name is shortened to Wipro Limited, a syllabic abbreviation of Western India Products.
7. 1984The software division is set up, starting with a spreadsheet and a word processing package.
8. 1990The software business shifts to offshore development for overseas clients.
9. 1998Wipro is reported to be the second largest software exporter from India.
10. 2000American Depositary Shares are listed on the New York Stock Exchange in October.
11. 2000During the technology boom Wipro becomes the most valuable listed company in India, and Azim Premji is the country's richest person for five years running.
12. 2004Wipro becomes the second listed Indian information technology company to report annual revenue above one billion dollars.
13. 2006About 30 per cent of revenue comes from product engineering and research and development services.
14. 2007The company buys Infocrossing, its largest overseas acquisition at the time.
15. 2007Wipro launches a line of supercomputers under the Supernova name.
16. 2011SAGA-220, built with the Indian Space Research Organisation, is installed at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre.
17. 2012The non information technology businesses are demerged into Wipro Enterprises, about 14 per cent of revenue at the time.
18. 2013The hardware division is closed and Wipro stops making personal computers, laptops and servers.
19. 2014Wipro Digital is created for design and mobility work.
20. 2015Wipro Ventures is set up to invest in enterprise software startups in the United States, India and Israel.
21. 2016The company buys Appirio for about 500 million dollars and HealthPlan Services for about 460 million dollars.
22. 2019Azim Premji steps back to chairman and his son Rishad Premji becomes executive chairman; the family commits the returns on most of its stake to the Azim Premji Foundation.
23. 2021Wipro announces a one billion dollar investment in its cloud services business and reports that a third of its workforce is on cloud projects.
24. 2022The company acquires the SAP consulting firm Rizing for about 540 million dollars.
25. 2023Wipro is criticised after cutting the salary offers made to about 4,000 graduate hires.
26. 2024Srinivas Pallia takes over as chief executive and managing director in April.
27. 2026The company reports revenue of about 92,624 crore rupees for the year to March 2026, with net profit of about 13,197 crore rupees.

What it does

Wipro sells technology work to large organisations. Its clients are banks, insurers, hospitals, manufacturers, retailers and telecom operators, mostly in the United States and Europe, and what they buy is a mix of software development, running of existing systems, cloud migration, cybersecurity, engineering and back office processing. The work is contracted for years rather than months, which is why the company's revenue moves slowly and why a single large client can matter to a financial year.^[1]

The company describes its operations under four global business lines. Wipro Technology Services covers cloud, cybersecurity, data analytics, artificial intelligence, enterprise applications and design. Wipro Consulting Services sells strategy and business consulting. Wipro Engineering Edge does engineering and research work for semiconductors, embedded systems, software defined products and industrial automation. Wipro Business Process Services handles outsourced processes such as finance, human resources and customer operations.^[1]

Wipro Labs, the research arm, works on areas the company expects clients to buy in the future: artificial intelligence, robotics, data analytics, and the software that runs connected devices. Some of this is genuinely old work, because Wipro has been writing engineering software for industrial clients since the 1980s, and some of it is presentational, because every large Indian information technology company now describes itself in the language of artificial intelligence.^[1]

Unlike consumers, clients of this kind change suppliers slowly. Contracts run for three to five years, renewals matter more than new logos, and the pricing is usually per person per month on a managed service basis. That model produces steady margins when the workforce is stable, and it produces trouble when clients decide to spend less, which is the cycle the Indian industry has lived through since 2023.^[1]

History

The company is older than the Indian software industry by several decades. Western India Vegetable Products Limited was incorporated on 29 December 1945 in Amalner, a town in the Jalgaon district of Maharashtra, to make cooking oil. The business grew into hydrogenated cooking fat, soap and other consumer goods, and the shares were listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange within a year of incorporation.^[1][2]

Azim Premji, then 21 and studying engineering in the United States, returned home in 1966 when his father died and took charge of a company that made vegetable oil and soap. Over the next fifteen years it added businesses that had nothing to do with each other: soaps and toiletries, lighting, hydraulic equipment, furniture, and later medical diagnostic equipment. It was a trading and manufacturing house in the Indian licence permit tradition, and the software work that made it famous was a late addition.^[1][8]

The technology shift began in the 1970s and accelerated through the 1980s. Wipro built its own computers after the government's restrictions on imported machines made them scarce, wrote software for the hardware it sold, and then discovered that overseas clients would pay in dollars for software alone. The shift from manufacturing to services took about twenty years, and by the late 1990s the company was exporting more software than it sold hardware.^[1][2]

The dot com years made Wipro briefly the most valuable company in India. When the bubble burst in 2000 the software exporters survived because their clients kept paying for maintenance and development, and Wipro used the following decade to build a global delivery model with development centres in India and offices near its clients. In 2012 it removed the businesses that did not fit and demerged them into Wipro Enterprises, which kept the consumer care brands, the lighting and furniture businesses, hydraulics, water treatment and the medical diagnostics joint venture.^[1]

Since then the company has been a services company only. It sold its hardware division in 2013, invested in digital and cloud work in the following decade, and bought consulting and engineering firms to add the skills its clients were asking for. Revenue has grown slowly in the last decade, which is the central fact about modern Wipro.^[1]

Early years and Azim Premji

Azim Premji is the reason Wipro became a technology company. He took over a family business that made cooking oil at the age of 21, and he ran it for more than fifty years, becoming for a period the richest Indian and, later, one of the largest individual donors in the country. His decision to move into computers in the 1970s was made when the Indian market could not buy them from abroad, which meant the company had to build them itself.^[1][3][4]

The family had traded in rice before the vegetable oil venture, and the business was run in the manner of a family firm, with directors drawn from the family and a controlling stake held through trusts and family companies. That structure is still in place: the promoter group led by Premji holds about 72.67 per cent of Wipro Limited.^[1]

In 2019 Premji handed the executive role to his son Rishad Premji and became chairman of the board, at the same time as the family committed the returns on about 67 per cent of its shareholding to the Azim Premji Foundation. The foundation works on school education in India and on university research, and its endowment makes it one of the largest philanthropic institutions in the country.^[1]

Premji's public reputation rests on two things: the software business he built from a cooking oil company, and the shares he gave away. The second is unusual, and it is the reason the Wipro page cannot be written without it. In 2000 he was named the richest Indian ever by India Today, and Forbes put him on its cover as a thirty billion dollar man; twenty years later the same fortune was largely committed to a foundation.^[1][3][4]

The move into information technology

The first serious technology product was a minicomputer built in 1981 on the Intel 8086 processor, developed in a laboratory at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru. Wipro then set up Wipro Infotech and Wipro Systems to sell hardware and software in India, and those two businesses carried the company into the personal computer and peripheral markets of the 1990s.^[1]

The software division started in 1984 with a spreadsheet and a word processing suite, and the real change came in 1990 when the company moved to offshore development for foreign clients. Offshore was the model that built the Indian industry: a client in the United States or Europe sent specifications, a team in India wrote and tested the code at a fraction of the cost of doing it locally, and the difference was shared. By 1998 Wipro was reported to be the second largest software exporter from India.^[1]

The company also built machines that matter to Indian science. In 2007 it launched the Supernova line of supercomputers for research institutions, and in 2011 it built SAGA-220 with the Indian Space Research Organisation, which was then the fastest supercomputer in the country and was installed at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre in Thiruvananthapuram.^[1][16]

By 2004 the services business had become large enough that Wipro was the second listed Indian information technology company to cross a billion dollars of annual revenue, and by 2006 nearly a third of that revenue came from engineering and research services rather than from routine application work. That mix, with a strong engineering component, is what distinguishes Wipro from a pure outsourcing shop.^[1]

Products and brands

The consumer businesses that Wipro grew up with are no longer part of Wipro Limited, but they are part of its history and its public recognition. The best known are Santoor and Chandrika soaps, sold through Wipro Consumer Care and Lighting, and the lighting and furniture businesses that kept the company's name in Indian shops long after it had become a software exporter.^[1]

• Santoor and Chandrika soaps, from the consumer care business, are among the largest selling soap brands in India and are still sold by Wipro Enterprises.^[1]
• Wipro Lighting supplies office and industrial lighting, and was part of the group before the 2012 demerger.^[1]
• Wipro Infrastructure Engineering makes hydraulic cylinders and is a large component supplier to construction and agricultural equipment makers.^[1]
• Wipro GE Healthcare, a joint venture with General Electric formed in 1990, made and sold medical diagnostic equipment in India.^[1]
• Wipro Supernova, launched in 2007, was the company's own line of supercomputers for research institutions.^[1]
• Wipro FullStride Cloud, announced in 2021 with a one billion dollar investment, is the services portfolio for cloud migration and operations.^[1]

The demerger in 2012 was a decision about what the company was. Wipro Limited kept information technology, and everything that made soap, lights and hydraulic cylinders went into Wipro Enterprises, which is unlisted and owned by the Premji family. About 14 per cent of group revenue moved with it, and with it went most of the company's consumer visibility in India.^[1]

Revenue and financials

Wipro's revenue has grown much more slowly than the two companies it is usually compared with. The company reported revenue of about 79,093 crore rupees in the year to March 2022, about 90,488 crore rupees in the year to March 2023, about 89,760 crore rupees in the year to March 2024, about 89,088 crore rupees in the year to March 2025 and about 92,624 crore rupees in the year to March 2026. Between the years to March 2023 and March 2026 the top line rose by roughly two per cent.^[6]

Profit has been steadier than revenue. Net income was about 11,350 crore rupees in the year to March 2023, about 11,045 crore rupees in the year to March 2024, about 13,135 crore rupees in the year to March 2025 and about 13,197 crore rupees in the year to March 2026. The company earns a gross margin of roughly 29 per cent, which is lower than the most profitable companies in the sector and roughly in line with the industry average, and it returns a large part of its profit to shareholders as dividends.^[6]

The mix shows where the money comes from. In the year to March 2026 the Americas 1 and Latin America business brought in about 30,503 crore rupees, the Americas 2 business about 26,853 crore rupees, Europe about 24,365 crore rupees and the Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa business about 10,209 crore rupees, with a small products line. Europe and the Americas together are therefore close to nine tenths of the company.^[6]

The balance sheet is comfortable. At March 2026 the company reported cash and investments of about 54,324 crore rupees against total debt of about 20,291 crore rupees, a net cash position of roughly 34,033 crore rupees. In October 2026 the share traded at about 174 rupees, which put the market value of the company at about 1.72 lakh crore rupees and the dividend yield at about 6.4 per cent, unusually high for an Indian information technology company.^[6]

Shareholding and ownership

Wipro is one of the few large Indian technology companies still controlled by its founding family. The promoter group headed by Azim Premji held about 72.67 per cent of the equity as of 2025, a level of ownership that is high even by Indian standards and that gives the family effective control of the board. The remaining shares are held by public shareholders and an employee trust.^[1]

Since 2019 the economic returns on about 67 per cent of the promoter holding have been committed to the Azim Premji Foundation, which means the dividends from the majority of the company largely fund philanthropic work in education rather than personal wealth. The shares are held through family trusts and investment companies, and the arrangement is one of the largest of its kind in India.^[1]

The company's shares have been listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange since 1946, the year after incorporation, and on the National Stock Exchange of India, where Wipro is a Nifty 50 constituent. American Depositary Shares have traded on the New York Stock Exchange since October 2000, which was part of the first wave of Indian technology companies to list in the United States.^[1][7]

Because the promoter stake is so large, the free float is small relative to the size of the company, and the dividend policy is generous. That combination makes the stock attractive to income investors and less responsive to growth news than its peers, which is visible in a price to earnings ratio of about 13 in October 2026, well below the sector.^[6]

Employees and offices

At March 2024 the company employed 234,054 people from 146 nationalities, of whom 36.6 per cent were women. It ran 26 offices in India and 58 offices in overseas locations. The largest concentrations are in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, Chennai, Kochi and Kolkata, with delivery centres in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and the Philippines.^[1]

The workforce is the product. In a services business, revenue per employee and the mix between onsite and offshore staff determine the margin, and Wipro's challenge for a decade has been that it has more people than growth requires. The company has run several rounds of what it calls productivity programmes, reducing headcount in some functions while hiring for cloud, cybersecurity and artificial intelligence work.^[1]

Wipro was one of the earlier Indian information technology companies to take environmental targets seriously, converting parts of its campuses to renewable electricity and reducing water use per employee, and it publishes a sustainability report with the annual accounts. Its campuses in Bengaluru and Hyderabad are among the largest corporate sites in the country.^[1]

Training is a large internal operation, with a mandatory programme for new engineering graduates that lasts several months. When the company deferred or restructured the joining dates of thousands of campus hires in 2022 and 2023, the decision was reported as a signal about the demand environment rather than as a fact about the company alone.^[1]

Acquisitions and joint ventures

Wipro has a long record of buying companies to enter new markets or add skills it did not have, usually small or mid sized targets rather than a single transformative deal. The list spans three decades and four continents.^[1]

• Infocrossing, bought in 2007, was the company's largest overseas acquisition at the time and brought data centre and infrastructure management work in the United States.^[8]
• Citi Technology Services, bought in 2008 for about 127 million dollars, added financial services technology capability and a long contract with Citigroup.^[1]
• Promax Applications Group, an Australian analytics company, was bought in 2012 for about 192 crore rupees.^[9]
• Designit, a Danish design firm, was bought in 2015 for about 85 million euros, which is the capability now inside Wipro Digital.^[10]
• Cellent AG, a German information technology services company, was bought in 2015 for about 78 million dollars.^[14]
• HealthPlan Services, bought in 2016 for about 460 million dollars, added a platform serving health insurance companies in the United States.^[13]
• Appirio, bought in 2016 for about 500 million dollars, was a cloud services company built around Salesforce and Workday.^[11]
• Edgile, bought in 2021, is a cybersecurity consulting firm working on identity, risk and compliance.^[15]
• Rizing, bought in 2022 for about 540 million dollars, is an SAP consulting partner with a large presence in the United States and Europe.^[12]

The pattern is consistent: buy a firm with an established client base in a market Wipro wanted, pay in cash from a strong balance sheet, and keep the founders for a few years. The company has also run joint ventures, the best known being Wipro GE Healthcare, formed in 1990 with General Electric, which made and serviced diagnostic imaging equipment in India and was part of the group until the 2012 demerger.^[1]

Competition

Wipro is one of the large Indian information technology services companies, alongside Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, HCLTech and Tech Mahindra, and it is generally described as the third or fourth largest of them by revenue. In India it competes for the same engineering graduates, the same campus slots and the same clients as those firms, and its growth rate has been the slowest of the group for several years.^[1]

The competition is no longer only Indian. Accenture, Cognizant, Capgemini, IBM and the captive centres that large companies run themselves all bid for the same work, and the global consultancies have moved into the same digital and cloud projects from the other direction. Clients increasingly buy outcomes rather than people, which favours firms with products and platforms of their own.^[1]

Price pressure comes from two sides. Clients in the United States and Europe have been consolidating suppliers and moving work to lower cost locations inside their own regions, and in India the same work is now offered by smaller firms at lower rates. The company's answer has been to move up into consulting and engineering work that carries better margins, and to use automation where the work is repetitive.^[1]

The one advantage Wipro has that a competitor cannot easily copy is its balance sheet and its ownership. With almost three quarters of the equity held by the founding family and a large net cash position, it can invest through a downturn and pay a large dividend while doing so, and it does not have to answer to the market every quarter about growth.^[1][6]

Controversies and criticism

Wipro's controversies are mostly about employment and controls rather than about its products. Three of them are documented in the company's own disclosures and in court records.^[1]

• The embezzlement and the securities case. In December 2009 the company found that a junior employee had taken about four million dollars, and the United States Securities and Exchange Commission opened an investigation into the company's internal financial controls. In December 2016 Wipro settled the case by paying a five million dollar penalty, without admitting or denying the finding that its controls were deficient.^[1]
• The discrimination lawsuit. In 2020 five former employees in the United States filed a class action in a New Jersey court alleging that Wipro discriminated against employees who were not of South Asian or Indian origin, and that more than 80 per cent of its 14,000 employees in the country were of South Asian origin. The company denied the claim and defended the case.^[1]
• The salary cuts. In February 2023 Wipro was criticised for reducing the annual salary package offered to about 4,000 graduate hires by nearly half. The company said the original offers still stood and that the revised offers gave candidates the option of joining immediately.^[1]
• Deferred joining dates. Thousands of campus recruits had their start dates pushed back through 2022 and 2023, a practice reported across the Indian information technology industry and criticised by students who had turned down other offers.^[1]

None of these episodes damaged the business the way a product failure would. The clients of an information technology services company care about delivery and cost, and the people affected by the employment disputes are mostly employees and graduates rather than customers. That is why the criticism has stayed inside the industry press and the courts.^[1]

Wipro Enterprises and the demerged businesses

Wipro Enterprises is the unlisted company that took the non information technology businesses away from Wipro Limited in 2012. It is owned by the Premji family, and it is why a shopper in India can still buy a Wipro branded light or a bar of Santoor soap while the listed company sells software. About 14 per cent of the group's revenue moved into it at the time of the demerger.^[1]

The largest part of it is Wipro Consumer Care and Lighting, which sells soaps, toiletries, wellness products and lighting. Santoor is one of the largest soap brands in the country and Chandrika is an older, south India brand, and the business also owns brands it has bought abroad in personal care. Wipro Infrastructure Engineering makes hydraulic cylinders and precision components for construction and agricultural machinery, and exports to equipment makers in Europe and the United States.^[1]

The separation is worth understanding because it changed what the listed company is measured on and because it explains the shape of the family's wealth. Wipro Limited is now a pure services company judged on revenue growth, margins and headcount, while Wipro Enterprises holds the consumer businesses, which grow more slowly, carry brand value, and have nothing to do with the stock market's quarterly expectations.^[1]

Sponsorships and public presence

Wipro's most useful piece of public spending was infrastructure rather than advertising. As a member of the Electronic City Industries Association, the company part funded the nine kilometre elevated expressway that connects Bengaluru's Electronic City to the city, which opened in 2010 and is used by tens of thousands of technology workers every day.^[1]

The company has been the title sponsor of road races rather than of cricket teams: the San Francisco Marathon, the Chennai Marathon and the Bengaluru Marathon at different times. Running events fit a company that sells to overseas clients and recruits young graduates, and they cost a fraction of a cricket sponsorship.^[1]

Its campuses are part of the public presence too. The Wipro campus in Bengaluru, spread across a large site in the Electronic City area, is one of the earliest and best known corporate technology campuses in India, and the company's sustainability reporting on energy and water there is among the more detailed in the industry.^[1]

Wipro and the Indian software industry

Wipro is one of the companies that made Indian software exports a national industry. Along with Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys and HCLTech, it proved in the 1990s that Indian firms could run large development projects for overseas clients, and the industry body Nasscom used those companies as the proof that the model worked. The sector they built now employs millions of people and earns more foreign exchange than any other Indian services export.^[1]

The model had a social effect that was never planned. Engineering colleges across India began training students for the recruitment tests of these companies, and a job in an information technology services firm became the standard ambition for a generation of graduates from small towns. Wipro's campus hiring, sometimes of several thousand people in a single season, was one of the biggest of these pipelines.^[1]

The model also had a weakness, which is now visible. The work these companies do is priced by the person and by the hour, so growth requires more people, and clients have spent the last decade trying to buy fewer people. Every large Indian services company, Wipro included, is now trying to sell software platforms and artificial intelligence based automation instead, and none of them has yet shown that the new work can grow as fast as the old work did.^[1]

Reading the numbers

The important number about Wipro is not its size but its lack of growth. The company reported about 90,488 crore rupees of revenue in the year to March 2023 and about 92,624 crore rupees in the year to March 2026, while its two largest competitors grew at double digit rates for parts of that period. A company of this size that grows at two per cent over three years is losing market share, and the share price reflects that: about 13 times earnings in October 2026 against much higher multiples for the market leaders.^[6]

The second number is the dividend. With a yield of about 6.4 per cent and a very large promoter holding, Wipro behaves like an income stock. For a family that has committed most of its shareholding to a foundation, a steady dividend is the point, and management has an incentive to protect profit rather than to buy growth at any price.^[6]

The third number is the cash. Net cash of about 34,033 crore rupees at March 2026 is more than a year of profit and roughly a fifth of the company's market value. It funds acquisitions, dividends and buybacks without borrowing, and it is the reason a company that is not growing fast can still return large amounts to its owners.^[6]

Read together, the three numbers describe a mature business with an unusual owner. Wipro is unlikely to become India's largest software exporter again, and it is also unlikely to be short of money, which is a comfortable position for a company whose clients sign contracts measured in years.^[1][6]

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