Dislodge Day after, Wipro says will lead peers by year-end

The pain of recast, which began early this year leading to a significant haemorrhaging of workforce, will end soon, said Suresh Senapaty, executive director and chief finance officer of Wipro, which was dislodged on Tuesday as India’s No.3 software firm by Cognizant Technology Services.

“The restructuring definitely impacted attrition. In the last quarter we increased compensation, both onsite and offshore. We have also focused on some softer aspects. So in this and the next quarters, we will see a significant moderation in attrition rates,” Senapaty said on the sidelines of an industry meet organised by CII.

Wipro’s employee attrition at 23.2% is well above peers, while utilisation including of trainees stands at 76.9%. Excluding trainees, it’s a little more at 81%.

The company will come out with ‘industry-leading growth’ numbers by the end of the current fiscal, Senapaty predicted.

“We announced the restructuring towards the end of January and some of the impact of the changes have been seen. A lot of those changes are in sales. From that point of view, in the shorter term, we got impacted by that. But with a rejuvenated sales engine, right kind of focus and investments, we see that in the next two quarters we should be able to deliver industry-leading growth rates,” he said.

As part of the restructuring exercise, Wipro replaced joint chief executive officers with a single CEO while it redefined three of its strategic business units as healthcare, pharma and life sciences; manufacturing and hi-tech; and energy and utilities.

“We have brought changes (in sales team) whereby right domain specialisation has been put in place; client-
engagement managers have been made more empowered in the front end — now more decision making is happening in front of customers rather than spending time internally,” Senapaty said.

The company also changed the way it has been doing business before, particularly the way it sells.

“We are targeting select customers where you can provide a lot of solutions that are customised so that we can increase our share of their wallet. We are also trying to be selective in the kind of customers being acquired, and going and selling to them on an integrated basis, whether there is BPO, IT or consulting with domain specialisation,” Senapaty said.

“Rather than selling in bits and pieces.”