Tech tycoon Azim Premji rides high on India’s electronics-wave

The market-cap league, as Premji has himself acknowledged, is just a notional indication of a company and its owners’ worth, which can soar or plummet on fickle investor sentiment.

But the underlying message is clear: the computer software sector is clearly the leader among a handful of sectors that have been fuelling a spectacular rise in India’s stock markets.

Facing challenges: "We thank our investors for recognising Wipro," the media-shy Premji said in a faxed statement on Thursday. "This recognition and its subsequent expectation from us, indeed pose a challenge." Analysts say that taking on challenges – and exceeding expectations – has been the hallmark of a man who does not have a reserved parking space outside his office in the southern city of Bangalore and prefers to fly economy class.Wipro’s success is the reward of a long journey down a road that Premji chose for Western India Vegetable Products Ltd – as it was known until 1977 – after his return from Stanford. Having diversified from vegetable oil into making hydraulic cylinders in the early 1970s, Premji embraced information technology in 1980 because he thought IBM Corp’s withdrawal from India would leave a market gap.

The Wipro Infotech group started manufacturing some of India’s first personal computers and also moved into offering software services for global clients who had started eyeing Indian firms for their huge cost advantage.Premji did not put all his eggs into the infotech basket. He also carved out a successful toilet soaps unit, a childcare products unit, a lighting products unit and a finance company. The company launched a joint venture with GE Medical Systems, a unit of General Electric Co, to make medical diagnostic instruments; another with British Telecom which was ended in 1998; and a third with Taiwan’s Acer International to make PCs which was dissolved last April. Recognised today as a quality software services firm with its core strengths in telecommunications and networking, Wipro has a client list that includes leading global firms such as GE, Lucent Technologies Inc, Nortel Networks, Alcatel and Cisco Systems.

An entrepreneur, not a technologist: Earlier this year, Wipro suffered an exodus of top software personnel who joined the bandwagon of those riding India’s venture capital funding boom to start their own firms. Premji, who prides himself on recruiting the best talent, was unmoved and appointed a young, former Wipro-GE employee, Vivek Paul, as the new head of his software unit. Today, one-circumspect analysts unhesitatingly admire the move as Paul spearheads Wipro’s continued March with more and more new business orders.

And the secret, as Premji himself unknowingly admitted at a recent lecture, is that he is not a technologist: "I am not a technologist but an entrepreneur in the area of technology". Investors seem to think that is more than enough.