#Q3WithNDTVProdit | #Wipro CEO Thierry Delaporte says he is holding daily conversations with potential clients after their IT budgets, but discretionary dealmaking is still some time away.
Read: https://bit.ly/3TYqVPo
Read: https://bit.ly/3TYqVPo
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00:00 IT services, as we have seen, has declined.
00:02 The BFSI part of the business also has declined.
00:04 The US contributes 61% of the business,
00:06 but growth here is flat.
00:08 Against that backdrop, how do you
00:10 see FI25 pining out for you in your biggest market?
00:14 For Aparna, a bit off.
00:17 We know that the IT services margin is 16.0 from 16.1.
00:21 But if you just do the pure math a bit
00:23 from your statement of accounts, we
00:25 see that the EBIT margin is up 105 BPS.
00:29 So where is this actual gap happening?
00:33 Just wanted to know.
00:34 Mr. Govil, your headcount is down.
00:37 The attrition is at a 10 quarter low.
00:39 Utilization is, I think, also decreased
00:41 by 4 percentage points.
00:44 Will you be undertaking hiring this year?
00:47 Or are you still expecting your numbers to go down?
00:51 And also on the hiring front, to anybody of you,
00:54 are you going to get a new chief growth officer?
00:58 So I'll take point number one and number four,
01:01 if you don't mind.
01:02 And I'll give you point number two and number three.
01:05 So for the first one, which is outlook for FY25,
01:09 I'm going to disappoint you.
01:11 It's a little too early to tell.
01:14 And by the way, we are guiding only for a quarter.
01:18 Look, January and February are typically
01:22 months where we are getting a lot of better visibility
01:27 on the budget of our clients.
01:30 So I am meeting clients every single day.
01:33 And I will see many of our clients in Davos next week,
01:38 where I'll get probably a better feel.
01:41 But that's the most honest answer I can give you.
01:47 On the point number four, which is around the growth office,
01:50 let me explain the rationale.
01:55 I'm the one who built the growth office.
01:57 And the reason for this was that we
02:02 needed to fill a gap that was visible in the organization
02:07 on several fronts.
02:08 One, we didn't have people, we didn't have a team
02:14 able to go after large deals.
02:16 So we needed to build this team, build people
02:23 who can go after large deals, so deals
02:26 that are much more significant in size than what we were
02:30 typically closing before.
02:32 The results of that has been last year
02:37 over the previous year, plus 70%.
02:40 This year, another plus 20%.
02:42 So this is paying off.
02:45 The teams have been built. They are working in every regions.
02:51 We feel this is the moment for them to be rolled back.
02:56 Now in the SMUs, in the regions, and work more directly
03:00 with their regional teams.
03:05 Second mission for the growth office
03:07 was to build a true management of the partnerships.
03:16 There was a fundamental disconnect at that time,
03:19 way back in 2020, that if you look
03:23 at the six largest partners of Wipro,
03:27 they were generating less than 20% of the revenue of Wipro.
03:34 So we have built a team.
03:36 And today, it's close to 50% of our revenue,
03:41 which I remind you is much bigger than what
03:43 it was four years ago, which is coming from our relation
03:46 with partners.
03:47 This relationship, this team managing partners
03:52 and ecosystem remain.
03:55 Now regarding the leadership of the growth office,
04:00 as you can imagine, there's nothing more important for me
04:04 today than making sure we are back rapidly to growth.
04:07 So I own it.
04:08 To your second point, when we say 16%,
04:17 it refers to the IT services segment results.
04:20 What you're seeing in the face of the financials
04:23 includes the IT products and the reconciling items.
04:26 There, we've taken a restructuring charge,
04:28 which is also having a play in the EBIT percentage, which
04:32 I've confirmed that you will not see such charges henceforth.
04:38 So on the hiring front, yes, the headcount
04:41 has come down, like the previous couple of quarters.
04:46 In the demand-constrained environment,
04:49 driving productivity, using technology, bringing in AI,
04:54 improving utilization-- and I'll come to utilization.
04:56 Utilization has not gone down by 4%.
04:58 We believe that we have enough capacity to grow.
05:02 And as and when demand comes, we will continue to grow.
05:04 Even now, for certain skills, specific technologies,
05:07 we continue to hire.
05:10 On utilization, if you see over the last few quarters,
05:15 again, in a degrowth environment,
05:17 we have improved our utilization.
05:18 This particular quarter, it's a seasonal thing
05:21 because we account for leave within that.
05:23 And being a high-leave quarter because of the holidays,
05:26 it's showing a marginal decrease.
05:28 But the trend is there, and we believe
05:30 there is capacity for us to-- headspace for us
05:32 to grow it further, improve utilization.
05:36 [MUSIC PLAYING]
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