Wipro CEO: Economic ‘Headwinds’ Hitting Business, Projections

‘By most accounts, we’ve closed our fiscal year at a significantly improved place from where we began. We’re getting stronger operationally, taking a more futuristic approach to our solutions. We have a growth mindset and the right organizational structure and the talent giving us the resiliency for long term success,’ says Thierry Delaporte, CEO and managing director of Wipro.

Despite Wipro Thursday reporting record bookings for its latest fiscal year, the global services provider’s CEO said “prolonged uncertainty” in the economy would have an impact in the near future.

“Our clients, our industry, many sectors are impacted by the prolonged uncertainty in the economic environment,” said Thierry Delaporte, CEO and managing director of Wipro, with dual headquarters in Bangalore, India and East Brunswick, N.J. “These headwinds are impacting our business and projections as well. For the next quarter, we are giving a sequential guidance of minus 3 [percent] to minus 1 percent in constant currency. On margins now, we expect to be in the similar range that we delivered in recent quarters.”

Nevertheless, the company in fiscal 2023 closed the year with record bookings and IT services operating profit.

“By most accounts, we’ve closed our fiscal year at a significantly improved place from where we began,” Delaporte said. “We’re getting stronger operationally, taking a more futuristic approach to our solutions. We have a growth mindset and the right organizational structure and the talent giving us the resiliency for long term success.”

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The transformation journey of Wipro, ranked No. 15 on CRN’s 2022 Solution Provider 500 list, continued in fiscal year 2023 with several strategic investments and acquisitions and added new capabilities, Delaporte said.

“Whether it is our account strategy, large deal approach, or our sector and market mix, there’s a clear and obvious difference between Wipro pre-2020 in the Wipro of today,” he said. “Our top accounts are bigger in size. We have a more diversified pipeline. And we continue to make bold investments in talent to support our future growth.”

Wipro’s chief operating officer team under Amit Choudhary has brought new rigor to the way the company’s approaches operations to enhance delivery, client experience, and efficiency, Delaporte said.

“And we already seeing the impact,” he said. “Our utilization rates improved to 81.7 percent in Q4 from 79.7 percent in the previous quarter.”

Wipro believes its new organizational model of four strategic market units and four global business lines, or Four By Four, will further improve the company’s market position and improve the pace of innovation, Delaporte said.

As part of that new model, Wipro in February unveiled a plan to reorganize into four strategic global business lines as a way to help align the firm with changing customer requirements and high-growth emerging opportunities.

Starting April 1, Wipro is working with clients with global business lines centered on cloud, enterprise technology and business transformation, engineering, and consulting.

“Wipro FullStride Cloud is a significant growth driver for us,” he said. “You know that. As a decade dedicated global business line, it will accelerate growth, innovate with partners and clients, and deliver on the promise of cloud via differentiated capabilities. Our new Enterprise Futuring global business line will combine our enterprise technology platforms and digital operations and security. Imagine by leveraging data and artificial intelligence as well as immersive technologies, this GBL (global business line) will build a distinctive forward-looking view into our clients’ operational and technology needs.”

Wipro is also moving forward on employee development, Delaporte said.

“In a highly dynamic business and technology environment, building the right skills across our organization is more important than ever,” he said. “Over the past year, we’ve trained over 50,000 employees in demand-driven skills. ‘Next-gen associates,’ formerly called ‘freshers,’ continue to be a critical part of our talent strategy. By the way, the renaming of this group of colleagues is a reflection of their value to our business and of our commitment to their success. We hired in fiscal year ‘23 22,000 next-gen associates, the highest ever in our history.”

For its fiscal fourth quarter 2023, which ended March 31, Wipro reported revenue of $2.8 billion, which was up 11.2 percent over that of fiscal fourth quarter 2022.

The company reported net income for the quarter of $374.1 million, or 7 cents per share, down slightly over those of last year.

For all of fiscal 2023, Wipro reported revenue of $11.0 billion, up 14.4 percent over last year. However, earnings fell 7.2 percent to 25 cents per share.