Jewel in the crowd: Azim Premji, chairman of Wipro

From the Guardian, UK.

Jewel in the crowd

Azim Premji, chairman of Wipro

Randeep Ramesh in Bangalore
Saturday January 22, 2005
The Guardian

Drive out of Bangalore on the road to Sarjapur and you cover more than the seven miles needed to reach the manicured lawns and brick orange headquarters of one of the country's biggest software companies, Wipro. Dodging bullocks, pushbikes and cratersized potholes, the journey is more time travel than car trip.

Once inside Wipro's futuristic campus, the digital divide between the civic disorder outside and the quiet electronic hum of progress inside is startling. Bangalore is India's richest seam of information technology talent, and Wipro is one of the brightest, shiniest diamonds.

With a customer list that includes Sony, Microsoft, Nokia and Dell, the company has seen profits triple to $230m (£115m) and sales double to more than $1.2bn during the last four years.

Its latest third-quarter results, published yesterday, show a jump of 60% in profit. Wipro's ability to insert itself into the world's corporate DNA has made it a name recognised in boardrooms from New York to Tokyo.

At the centre of all this action is India's richest man, Azim Premji. He owns 83% of Wipro, currently valuing his holding at $10bn. Not that any of this is visible. A modest and softly spoken man, Premji is known as a thrifty businessman who still drives a secondhand saloon car and takes commercial flights. His salary last year was $360,000.

A bit strange, perhaps, for a man who at the beginning of 2000, the height of technology mania, was worth £35bn, more than Oracle founder Larry Ellison and global investor Warren Buffett. "Why walk the talk? The wealth is all notional. I did not sell the shares then, so I don't have the money," says Premji.

Wipro's chairman appears uncomfortable in talking too much about anything else but business.

Answers tend to be short: for instance, ask about being a Muslim in India, let alone the richest person in the land, and you get a terse reply. "It is the strength of our culture that we can have Sonia Gandhi, who is Catholic, a Sikh prime minister and a Muslim president."

In conversation one soon realises this is not because Mr Premji does not hold views, but because he does.

Provoking him is difficult, although on Bangalore's potholed traffic-laden roads, he growls rather than speaks. "I can't have my employees sitting in traffic when they should be in the office. Spending two-and-half-hours in the car is a huge waste of productive time. The government needs to act to sort these things out."

Given this, Wipro's chairman makes no apology over the hot political issue of outsourcing, where white-collar jobs are draining away from the west to countries such as India. He says the issue has given the software industry in India exposure "a billion-dollar campaign could not buy".

It is possible to scoff at Premji's vision. At present he has 1,000 consultants, whereas Accenture has 56,000. In terms of revenue, consulting brings in just 5% of Wipro's revenue. But the naysayers have to deal with an endorsement from the computing world's top geek, Bill Gates, who remarked casually not long ago that "soon it will be common sense when a complex project is to be delivered to say 'how about we talk to Wipro about this?' "