Wipro: A billion dollar show

Technology major Wipro has posted a stellar set of numbers this quarter, way above street expectations. In fact, it has been the best set of quarterly numbers compared to the IT biggies. All business segments have contributed to the strong growth in revenues and profits for the company during the current financial year.

Revenues of their combined IT businesses crossed the landmark of USD 3 billion in annual revenue. Wipro’s Global IT business crossed the Rs 100 billion mark and grew 38% to Rs 110.95 billion (Rs. 11,095 crores). The Enterprise Solutions Business in Global IT Services segment crossed USD 1 billion of annual revenue and Finance Solutions Business crossed USD 500 million.

With Enterprise Solutions crossing USD 1 billion, Sudip Banerjee, President-Enterprise Solutions, Wipro gives the road ahead for the business. He mentions, "We have had three solid performing verticals in Enterprise throughout the year. We had huge growth in retail; we had huge growth in energy and utilities and very significant improvement in the manufacturing business. As we go into the next quarter, apart from these, the health care business has also formed a very small base growing very fast."

Wipro expects all the verticals, which has been drivers for growth in the past, to continue to perform in the next quarter. He adds, "Healthcare will continue to be there next quarter and manufacturing and retail will also fire. So we are hoping that all the verticals will continue their growth and we will see a very solid, all round growth in Enterprise Solutions in '07-'08."

Wipro's CFO, Suresh Senapaty is extremely optimistic of the outlook in FY08. "The most important thing we are happy about is that, for the first time, we have achieved a USD 3 billion revenue for our IT business as a whole and also so far as enterprise solution is concerned, it crossed USD 1 billion. We had Wipro BFSI cross USD 0.5 billion and Wipro Infotech again crossed USD 0.5 billion and the Q4 revenue for Wipro as a whole has touched USD 1 billion of revenue," he says.

Senapaty sees a very strong deal pipeline even in terms of large deals. "In the last one-year, we won about ten USD 50 million accounts and the kind of pipeline we are seeing and the initiative we have taken in terms of large deals and also the initiative we are taking in Canada, in terms of an investment, all of them are showing up in the results. We would look forward to much more of that coming through in 2007-08. So overall, 2007-08 looks very exciting for us." 

Commenting on the BFSI segment, Girish Paranjpe, President-BFSI says, "The business still looks good and we have good run up so far in the past 3 years growing 50% year on year. This year we crossed USD 0.5 billion. While there maybe some segments in the market, which may have been affected, we don’t see major impact on our business or our ability to continue to grow in the future. So I continue to be optimistic about what the future holds for us."

Suresh Vaswani mentions that The IT practices, which comprises of testing services, infrastructure services and package implementation services have delivered very strong performance. They continue to be growth drivers and strong differentiators for Wipro.  He adds, "We have had some very exciting wins across the board, to give you a flavour of some large test outsourcing went from US based bank, a large infrastructure managed services contract from a large manufacturing company in the US and fairly strong CRM engagement with the telecom service provider in Europe. It has been a strong robust performance and we expect these service lines to continue to drive Wipros growth going forward."