Wipro?s numbers may appear less impressive compared to TCS and Infosys but joint CEO Suresh Vaswani of the firm?s IT Business tells FE?s Goutam Das that the company is on track with growth coming from all its verticals.
Wipro?s volume growth in Q2 has lagged. Is there a focus on the quality of sale rather than just volumes?
I am interested in more strategic business with customers. What we want to do is use our resources for delivering a service to customers rather than put our resources to deliver people to customers. We have not driven growth that way. That is easy business and is short-term.
What were the positives during the quarter?
I would say solid revenue growth, led by offshore volumes and growth across all sectors. Some of the sectors where we invested in more strategically, given the current environment, have begun to yield great results. Healthcare, retail and energy & utilities have been driving strong growth. Sequentially, banking grew at more than 5%and consulting business rose by 14%. It is a significant part of our revenue. We have won seven large deals. All of them are greater than $30 million and are transformational in nature.
Why is the consulting practice showing good momentum?
That is because we have invested in it. We have built strong capability, practices and are making the consultants and the client engagement managers in large accounts work closely. Europe has grown in double digits, sequentially.
Even Infosys had reported strong growth. Why is the continent suddenly looking for Indian players?
Europe is relatively lesser mature. Many customers are getting into serious outsourcing now. Some of our verticals are strong in Europe such as energy & utilities as well as Banking. The fact that we have set up a strong presence in Germany and France is also beginning to pay off.
Some of your peers are going aggressive on China. How do you view your presence in the country?
China is a long-term play. We will need to build up more capacity. Two, we have to create a lot more visibility and we are doing that. The vice premier of China was at one of our centres two days back to address our Chinese employees. There are two types of customers we are addressing. One is the global customer with presence in China and two, the Chinese customer with presence globally. We have around 400 people in the country. The direction is to grow the development centres. However, it will be one step at a time. The India business took a long time to build up. China and India are fairly similar.
What is your sense of next year?s IT budgets?
People will spend money to save money. We do believe that the budgets will go up; demand situation will look good. While the global IT services market could grow between 2% and 4%, the growth for Indian IT services firms will be much more, between 15% and 20%.