Shortly after presenting the Wipro’s financial results for 2012-13, Executive Director and CEO (IT Business) T. K. Kurien spoke to The Hindu . Excerpts from the interview:
The last year has been generally considered difficult for the IT services industry. How has it been for Wipro in comparison to your competitors?
We had identified four key focus areas — banking and financial services (BFSI), energy and utilities, retail and health care — which we wanted to develop into world-class SBUs. Globally, our energy and utilities vertical is now the third biggest in terms of revenues, just behind IBM and Accenture.
How far behind are you…
About a billion dollar. While our competition is growing at about 4-5 per cent, we have been growing annually at 15-20 per cent in the last three years. Health care is our second biggest focus area. When we started a few years ago, we had only two of the top 10 pharma accounts.
Now, we have all 10 accounts. Now we have scale in this line of business. It has not yet translated into revenues, but we are confident that we will do well over a period. In retail, we have not performed to potential, and in BFSI too, we are underweighted.
In short, during the last year, of the six verticals we have, one vertical (energy and utilities) has performed way ahead of the market, and five have performed as well as the market. That is the summary of last year.
How has Wipro’s pricing strategy changed over the last year?
Our pricing has, in fact, gone up last year — by 4.2 per cent onsite and by 2.7 per cent offshore. We have managed to increase prices in a market where everybody else is reducing prices. On the scale side of the business, we will continue to drive efficiency so that our average ticket price goes up. But on the flip side, we have done this by somewhat sacrificing volume. So, we have to get volume back this year.
What is Wipro’s approach to achieving non-linear growth?
We believe that hiring in the industry, especially freshers, is on a secular decline when compared to the past. What is happening is that a lot of the lower end work is getting automated. We are going to have a double pyramid. There will be volume at one end and value at the other end. But we are not going to go back on our committed hiring plans.
