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Wipro Limited
Wipro is an Indian IT services company that helps big businesses around the world run their technology and back-office operations.
Wipro is one of India's big information technology services firms. It doesn't sell software you install on your laptop. Instead, it sells people and projects: it takes over the messy, expensive technology work that large companies would rather not do themselves, and runs it from delivery centers in India and elsewhere for a monthly fee.
The work comes in a few main flavors. Wipro will build and maintain custom software for a bank or a retailer, run the cloud infrastructure a company depends on, and handle back-office chores like processing invoices, answering customer support tickets, and managing payroll. Its customers are mostly large enterprises in banking, insurance, healthcare, manufacturing, and energy — the kind of organizations with thousands of employees and decades of legacy systems held together with duct tape. Those clients sign multi-year contracts because ripping out and replacing their technology is slow, risky, and expensive, and because Wipro can do the work cheaper than keeping a huge in-house team. The business is brutally competitive. Wipro fights for the same contracts as Accenture, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, Cognizant, and HCL Technologies, and price pressure is constant. It also faces a newer threat: artificial intelligence is starting to automate exactly the kind of routine coding, testing, and back-office work that has been Wipro's bread and butter for decades. That is both a risk and an opportunity — Wipro is racing to sell AI-powered services to clients before AI eats its traditional revenue.
Wipro's structure has an unusual twist. Its founding family, the Premjis, still holds a big stake through a holding company, and in 2023 the company named a new chief executive, Srinivas Pallia, after his predecessor Thierry Delaporte stepped down following a stretch of weak growth. Wipro has spent heavily on acquisitions to bulk up its consulting muscle, including buying Capco, a financial-services consultancy, and Rizing, which specializes in SAP software for HR and enterprise clients. The company also returns cash to shareholders through dividends and buybacks. In short, Wipro sells brainpower and process discipline to the world's biggest companies, and its future depends on whether it can stay useful in an age when software increasingly writes itself.
Saved answer · last researched 12 Nov 2026
Timeline
Cooking Oil in Amalner
In 1945, a man named M. H. Hasham Premji started a small company in Amalner, a town in India, making cooking oils. The business sold vegetable oil that later became known under the brand Sunflower Vanaspati. It was a simple, everyday product — nothing that hinted at computers or software. Yet this little oil maker is the seed everything else grew from.
A Son Leaves Stanford
When Hasham Premji died, his son Azim Premji was studying at Stanford University. He dropped out and came home to run the family business at just 21. Handing a cooking oil company to a young man who never finished college was not an obvious recipe for greatness — but he would spend decades reshaping it.
The Name Wipro Arrives
The company renamed itself Wipro Products Limited, and later simply Wipro Limited — a shortened, easier version of Western India Vegetable Products. The name change was small, but it marked a company beginning to think of itself as more than an oil maker.
A Computer Built in a Lab
In the 1980s, the company saw opportunity in computers, so it set up Wipro Infotech and Wipro Systems. Then, in 1981, it built the first Indian minicomputer using an Intel chip, put together in an Indian science institute's lab. That was a bold leap for a company that had spent decades squeezing oil. The hardware bet was real, but it was also the start of a bigger question: where would the real money be?
From Spreadsheets to Software Exports
The software arm began in 1984 with a spreadsheet and word-processing suite, then shifted in 1990 toward writing software for clients abroad. That shift — doing the work offshore for foreign companies — turned out to be the money-maker, with higher margins than hardware. By 1998 the company was India's second-largest software exporter, and its center of gravity was quietly moving from machines to services.
India's Most Valuable Company
During the dot-com boom, Wipro became the most valuable company in India — at its peak worth three times the next largest listed company, Infosys. Investors were so excited they paid 700 times earnings, a price that assumed the future would be enormous. Then the dot-com crash hit, and the stock never returned to that high. It was a lesson in what happens when a stock price runs far ahead of the business.
Shedding the Non-IT Business
Wipro split off its non-IT businesses into a new private company called Wipro Enterprises, which had brought in about 14% of revenues. Soon after, it shut its hardware division entirely, stopping the making of personal computers, laptops, and servers. With that, the journey that began with cooking oil ended: Wipro was now purely an IT services company.
Capco and a Consulting Push
Wipro bought Capco, a consultancy focused on financial services, for $1.45 billion, and added cybersecurity firm Ampion for $117 million. Financial services became its biggest segment, and the company was clearly buying its way into higher-value consulting work. These deals were ambitious — the question was whether Wipro could stitch them together.
A Veteran Takes Over
After those acquisitions, the pieces did not fit together smoothly and growth lagged its rivals. So Wipro replaced CEO Thierry Delaporte with Srini Pallia, a 30-year company veteran. Pallia pushed decisions back down to the people closest to clients and focused on internal stability and serving customers, rather than chasing grand restructuring. It was a bet that a steadier hand could fix what the deal spree had unsettled.
The Turnaround Bet on AI
Under Pallia, Wipro began to look like a turnaround story: a billion-dollar investment in artificial intelligence and a leaner, consulting-led way of delivering work. Analysts were split on near-term revenue, but a record pipeline of deals and a stock that had been performing made investors look again. The old oil company was now selling AI-driven services — and the market was starting to believe it.
Mindsprint and Platform-Led Delivery
Wipro agreed to buy Mindsprint, the IT and digital arm of Olam Group, for $375 million, along with an eight-year contract worth more than a billion dollars. The deal was read as a shift away from simply billing for headcount, toward platform-led delivery and AI-driven outcomes — buying ready-made intelligence built into supply chain workflows. It was the clearest sign yet of where the company that began with cooking oil now wanted to go.