There is a time for consolidation and there is a time for change. Somehow, Azim Premji, chairman of Wipro, has always managed to do both together. Even as he continued to build on the company’s core strengths—quality processes, price competitiveness and relationship management—he led the group through yet another reorganization, the sixth in five years, and ventured farther afield into Europe. In the process, Wipro posted a 47.7% growth in gross revenues to cross Rs 3,000 crores.

Wipro was the first software services company in the world to attain SEI-CMM Level 5 certification and last year saw it well on its way to Six Sigma. It’s price competitiveness ensured that despite the severe downturn in the US economy, it was one of the few companies, if not the only one, to significantly increase its margins. And most importantly, last year also saw Wipro being listed at the New York Stock Exchange. As Premji said after the October listing, "We realized that any organization wanting to go global must have its face to the customer, because it is only the customer who has the right to grant us our future." The listing ensured that everything that referred to Wipro landed right on the customer’s desktop.

The listing was important, as was the timing. Wipro’s global software services arm—Wipro Technologies—brings in close to 60% of its revenues and over 80% of its net profit. Last year saw Wipro Tech increasing its presence in the European and Japanese market, where branding is a major issue. Premji hopes that the NYSE listing will go a long way in adding to the group’s brand value.

Wipro Technologies has been trying to target the Japanese market for a couple of years now and the efforts seem to be paying off—this was the geography that brought in the maximum growth in revenues. In July, the company set up a dedicated offshore development center (ODC) in Hyderabad for Bussan Systems Integration Co, a Japanese telecom firm, for work in telecom, Internet services and wireless application areas. In return, BSI agreed to market Wipro’s telecom solutions in Japan.

In Europe, the company set up offices in Germany and France and its first European development center at Reading, UK, with 50 application specialists. This center will provide application development, support and maintenance of IS apps to UK customers. Its real purpose, though, is to grow to cover the entire European market in a couple of years.

Most importantly, however, Wipro Tech increased its revenues from high-value R&D services in verticals like telecom and internetworking, embedded systems and Internet access devices and telecom and Internet service providers. Vivek Paul, head, Wipro Tech, says "We do a lot of ASIC design, even though no one really thinks of us as a chip design company at the moment." Almost half of Wipro Technology’s revenue came from this horizontal. In the enterprise area, it significantly reduced exposure in the healthcare and media verticals while marginally improving its performance in the financial services sector, which remained the most insulated from the slowdown.

Closer home, Wipro Infotech, the domestic products and services company, underwent yet another series of changes. Over the past few years, the only thing that has been constant at Wipro has been change. An unending saga of reorganizations, of entire divisions being shunted around, hived off or merged together. After having successfully taken the company past the break-up of the Acer joint venture, Arun Thiagarajan retired last December and Suresh Vaswani, a campus recruit and CEO of Wipro01markets, moved in as president of Wipro Infotech. Around this time, Infotech’s peripherals division was hived off into a separate entity called Wipro e-peripherals, while its global support division got taken over by Wipro Technologies. By the end of the year, the board had also recommended the merger of Wipro Net into Wipro Infotech. This, however, will come into affect only in the ongoing financial year. The company also decided to get into the solutions business and move to new geographies in the West Asia and APAC regions.

Wipro has had a reputation for being a giant that moves slowly but steadily and surely. No 100% growth rates for this company, just a slow and steady increase from 20% growth in 1997-98 to over 47% this year. But then that’s the thing with stolid giants—no big high in good years and no big lows in bad years, as this one is turning out to be. Azim Premji hasn’t promised much—just that Wipro will continue to grow fast—looks like he will keep his promise in the coming year as well.