The CEO of the IT Business of Wipro, T. K. Kurien, and Senior Vice-President (Advanced Technologies), Shaji Farooq, give their perspective of the quarter that went by in an interaction with The Hindu . Excerpts:
What has been significant in this quarter?
We have gone about executing the strategy we have set for ourselves. There are a couple of broad pieces. The first is about investing in customers where we can scale up. This is also about divesting from customers for whom our work was not strategic, and where we believe we are doing little bits of work. The other bit was about investing in the future, from a technology perspective, while driving efficiency in the core of our business.
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The result of this is that the top 10 accounts have given us 8.2 per cent sequential growth in the last quarter, which is significantly ahead of most companies in this space.
We had nine $100 million accounts, an increase of one; we also had sixteen $75 million accounts, two more than previously. Client satisfaction was up 16 per cent year-on-year.
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But your profitability was down in the last quarter by 30 basis points on a sequential basis…
Last quarter we took a 1.9 percentage point impact that hit us — 0.2 per cent because of sales and marketing expenses, 0.3 per cent because of utilisation, and 0.7 per cent because of foreign exchange losses. But we have become highly efficient. And, we are using intellectual property to drive efficiency.
In terms of pricing, a 1.9 per cent increase in onsite pricing and 1.5 per cent increase in offshore pricing is pretty decent, when compared to some of our peers. Our intellectual property in terms of tools, technology and solutions will drive down costs.
You have said you are focused on analytics, cloud and mobility. Is it taking time to reflect in margins?
We are already seeing it as a significant driver of growth. The demand for analytics is due to skyrocket, given the desire for clients to monetise data. On the cloud business, we were already doing a lot of work. This is also true of mobility. But the thing is that it is not all about technology. It is about making a fundamental transformation in business processes and user experience. If we can offer clients solutions that require a fraction of the people required to handle a process, we would have succeeded.
Our analytics business is now close to one billion dollars. Three years ago, it was less than $300 million. But cloud, analytics and mobility will grow not by themselves but as business solutions that we offer clients. In three years, 30 per cent of our revenues will come from business solutions, not from components of technology.
But do you see clients willing to spend on this at the moment?
If I go to a client and try and sell mobility, what I get is a little piece of mobility. But when we go and put cloud, analytics and mobility together and offer clients significant cost reduction, we find clients much more amenable. If you sell more bodies to implement mobility, frankly that is a dead-end game. Our value comes in in marrying the domain and processes together.