Wipro not ready for double-digit growth yet: Abidali Neemuchwala

Wipro has seen revival in business on the back of recovery in its main market, the US, and from banking customers and it expects the first quarter results as the base to reflect the rebound in numbers. The company still struggles with the restructuring of its India and West-Asia business, besides the healthcare vertical due to its write-offs in the investments in HealthPlan services.

“We have good pipeline of large deals. We have talked about our strategic partnership with Alight (Solutions) which is a significant deal. The pipeline looks very robust,” said Wipro CEO Abidali Neemuchwala in an interview with Ayan Pramanik and Raghu Krishnan. Edited excerpts:

Are the days of slow growth over?
The demand is much better so definitely the growth will be better. We have done much better execution than we thought we will. We just need to be very careful about bankruptcies because in the last quarter, we were badly hit by two clients (going bankrupt). We have some of our own challenges like the HPS acquisition in healthcare vertical and the impact in the UK utility segment. Going forward, we will see growth. We are not ready for a double-digit growth yet. Our gross growth would be high but our India decline and HPS decline would soften that. We have good pipeline of large deals. We have talked about our strategic partnership with Alight (Solutions) which is a significant deal. The pipeline looks very robust.

How has been the journey given the challenges Wipro is seeing?
The biggest thing is that I had the opportunity to do is to reconfigure Wipro into a digital company. Our digital business is now about 28-29% of our overall revenue. It has been growing double digit for the last eight quarters.


We had to build our consulting business and it is now 6% of our overall business. We had to improve our client mining and that has been a historical problem. Our top clients have been growing 7-8% year-onyear, and the CQGR has been very good for top 100 clients.