Premji rings opening bell at NYSE

Wipro chairman Azim Premji said that, going forward, a series of liberalisations of the economy will be announced by the Indian government, but the pace may not as fast as would be expected by many in the United States.

"Perhaps they will not be as fast as our American friends would like to them be, but those are the realities of democracies, particularly of a democracy which is based on an alliance government with the components of communists and others," Premji said during a US analysts/investors meet at the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday.

"But let me assure you that whether the pace is fast or slow, the direction is very uniform and the direction is very much in terms of going forward liberalisation," Premji said in his remarks at the 2007 Analyst Day meet.

He addressed the meeting after ringing the opening bell at the 'Big Board,' the nickname of NYSE, where he rang the closing bell February 8 last year to commemorate the 5th anniversary of the company's listing on NYSE.

Among those present at the meet included Suresh Senapati, chief financial officer, K B Chandrasekhar, head of Americas and Europe, and some business unit presidents of the company.

Premji outlined the achievements and performance of the company and its plans for the next level of growth strategy, which, he said, will include strategic partnerships as well as investments in innovations.

"We are investing in innovations, not incremental innovations but breakthrough innovations," he said, adding that there will be four major innovation projects this year itself.

In quarter ending December 31, 2006, Wipro recorded 43 per cent growth in total revenue and 40 per cent growth in net income revenue from global it services and products business that stood at $640.5 million.

"We have had another satisfying quarter. Our global IT business delivered good volume growth primarily driven by robust performance of our energy and utilities vertical, technology infrastructure services and enterprise application services," Premji said.

On Tuesday, he gave an inkling to investors about his plans for the future growth of the company. "We are expanding our global footprint in our delivery centers. Once we scale up to 400-500 people we are evaluating one new delivery center in low cost centers in that area. We are looking at some other low-cost centers and one of them could be potentially be Vietnam that has a certain profile which would be interest to us," Premji said.

Noting that Wipro has such centers in Portugal, Brazil, Romania and other low cost centers, he said the company is now also looking at lower cost locations in Europe and in the US as part of a strategy.

"We are looking at lower cost locations in the US, typically in university locations, typically in states which are less developed, states like Virginia, Georgia or say in Idaho where we recruit locally people who are graduating from universities and take them to India for three to five months of training as part of standard induction program and keep them in work for three months to help them familiarize with the global delivery model and then shift them to these low-cost delivery centers so they can work with us in future," he said.

"We have discussed (this) with government and we discussed this with the ex-Governor of Virginia Mark Warner. We can expect to get lower cost and significant state subsidy because of this initiative which can be effective not only in terms of political localisation but there is possibility that this kind of centers will build our equity with state governments and therefore (there cane be)  potential business with state governments," Premji said.

"They also result in significant cost-cutting because these centers will be low cost even compared to centers in India," he added.