Wipro’s first-quarter net profit rose 1.2% to ₹2,077 crore driven by higher revenue at the software services provider’s energy and utilities and banking, financial services and insurance segments.
Revenue rose 0.2% to ₹13,626 crore for the April-June quarter compared with the year-earlier period.
‘Client mining’
“We delivered revenues above the upper end of the guidance range,” said Abidali Z. Neemuchwala, CEO and board member commenting on the results. “Our focus on digital combined with our investments in client mining have resulted in strong growth in top accounts,” he said.
The board also approved a buyback proposal worth ₹11,000 crore. The company intends to buy 34.3 crore shares at ₹320 a piece. Recently, Wipro had come out with a 1:1 bonus. In 2016, the firm had announced a buyback of 40 million shares at ₹625 per share.
Profit from the company’s flagship IT services segment declined by 5.8% to ₹2,190 crore compared with the year-earlier period. The IT services margin for the quarter was 16.8%.
The company expects its IT services business revenue to be in the range of $1,962 million to $2,001 million for the second quarter.
The firm said it had redeployed about 12,000 people under Project NextGen in 2015.
“We started a lean kind of initiative in NextGen, which then matured into hyper automation, which is essentially through either robotic automation or our Wipro Holmes platform, which is AI and cognitive technologies,” said the CEO.
(With PTI inputs)
