Azim Premji – the “Bill Gates of India” -- transformed his father’s cooking oil company into Wipro Ltd., a software colossus with 100,000 employees in 50-plus countries. Revenue last year topped $6 billion.
Like Tata and Infosys, Indian companies that introduced the world to far-flung call centers and the outsourcing of Western jobs, Wipro is aggressively moving up the software ladder. Growth prospects include software development and support, information security and cloud computing.
Wipro came to Atlanta three years ago, one of the city’s most coveted business recruits. It employs 535 people in Buckhead and expects to nearly double that number within two years.
Atlanta is Wipro’s largest U.S. operation. It develops software, runs a call center and business consultancy for health care, telecom, utility and financial service companies.
Eighty percent of employees were hired locally, most from UGA, Georgia Tech and Georgia State.
Premji, 64, stopped by the Atlanta office last week. He’s No. 28 on Forbes list of richest people with an estimated net worth of $17 billion. He recently co-chaired the World Economic Forum in Switzerland.
And, like Bill Gates, he expects to give away most of his fortune. Educating India’s rural masses tops Premji’s philanthropic push.
Premji’s visit preceded the first USA India Business Summit, which started Monday and ends Tuesday at the Cobb Galleria.
Premji spoke with reporter Dan Chapman.
Q: Why did you choose Atlanta?
A: We short-listed three U.S. cities. Atlanta came out as the No. 1 choice. We wanted to build near-shore centers primarily populated by hiring from local colleges. Traditionally we have recruited our head-count from local colleges. We build our own culture and do our own training. We saw no reason to make an overseas exception.
Q: “Near-shoring?” After years of American anger toward the outsourcing of tech jobs to India, why did Wipro set up shop in the U.S.?
A: What led us to come here was not the backlash, but fundamental business principles. Companies operating locally are much better off vis-a-vis social acceptance and government contracts. Community acceptance is part of running a business.
Q: Notwithstanding your fondness for Georgia college graduates, is there enough engineering talent in the United States?
A: What you must appreciate is that there is a lack of technical personnel graduating in Western countries. It has come to the stage of being serious. Over the last 18 months the talent was available (during the recession). Now it’s back to being available only at a premium price. Long term, there’s a huge shortage of technical talent.
Q: How did you survive the recession? And what does the future hold?
A: Growth slowed down very significantly, from 25 percent to 3 percent last year. We expect it to go back to 15 percent this year. We froze the head-count. We applied performance standards much more strictly. We had significant cost take-outs, but continued to invest in innovation and training. Even though we added zero head-count company-wide, we still added significantly in Atlanta – and this center still loses money.
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