Wipro
More info
- Creator
- Mohamed Hasham Premji
- Released
- 1945
- Type
- IT services company
An Indian cooking-oil maker that became one of the world's largest IT services firms and kept the sunflower in its logo.
The name abbreviates Western India Vegetable Products, founded in 1945 in Amalner to press oil from groundnuts. Azim Premji took over in 1966, aged 21, after his father's death. When IBM left India in 1978 rather than accept Indian co-ownership, it left a vacuum, and Wipro moved into building minicomputers and then writing software for foreign clients.
From the 1990s it rode the same wave as Infosys and TCS: outsourced operations, application maintenance and testing at a fraction of Western hourly rates. The soap-and-oil business lives on as a separate company. Premji has given away much of his fortune to education, making him one of the few tech billionaires better known for philanthropy than for a memoir.