Bangalore: India’s third largest software exporter by sales, Wipro Ltd, says it will focus on France and Germany in Europe and West Asia to offset slowing growth in the US as well as the UK.
“The entire Indian IT (information technology) export industry has been severely impacted because of developments in the US and UK markets. Wipro has taken steps to address newer markets in Europe and Asia which have been relatively insulated,” said Suresh Vaswani, joint chief executive officer, Wipro.
Offsetting losses: Suresh Vaswani, joint CEO, says Wipro is looking at expanding its non-IT verticals. Hemant Mishra / Mint
“In the Middle East, for instance, the opportunity to grow even further is large. Middle East economies have not been hit as hard as some of the other (economies globally),” he said. “We have good scope to broaden the services we offer in infrastructure management services, energy and utilities as well as retail space here (in West Asia).”
On expanding operations in countries such as France and Germany, where language skills had proved to be a hindrance, Vaswani said: “We have made significant headway by recruiting locally... We will grow in these markets.”
Wipro, which had set up a development centre in Germany in 2002, has since expanded its presence to six cities in the country. The company also has a large package implementation practice for German business software firm SAP AG.
Nearly 30% of the Bangalore-based company’s revenues come from Europe.
Vaswani said Wipro gets nearly 20% of its revenues from the Indian market. “We work with partners here and our system integration practice is very large.”
Wipro is also looking at expanding its health care, pharmaceuticals and governance verticals, aimed at offsetting the effects of the global economic slowdown.
Financial services firm Motilal Oswal Securities Ltd in a report on a post-results sectoral round-up of Indian IT companies, released on 3 February, pointed that even as blended realization rates for Infosys Technologies Ltd declined by 1.8% quarter-on-quarter and was flat from Tata Consultancy Services Ltd and HCL Technologies Ltd, Wipro reported realization of gains of 1.2%.
“Our value proposition is compelling and we belive that the current environment actually provides us an edge,” Vaswani said.
For the nine months ended 31 December, Wipro reported net profit of Rs2,890 crore on revenues of Rs19,092 crore.