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Bangalore Tiger

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Bangalore Tiger

How Indian Tech Upstart Wipro Is Rewriting the Rules of Global Competition

McGraw-Hill,

15 min read
10 take-aways
Audio & text

What's inside?

A former vegetable oil company in India has turned global commerce upside-down.

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Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Applicable

Recommendation

From humble beginnings as a manufacturer of vegetable oil in India, Wipro reinvented itself, with stunning speed, as one of the world's leading providers of high-tech and business-process outsourcing (BPO) services to clients around the globe. Early in this decade, Wipro's annual revenues were $500 million. By the end of the first quarter of 2007, Wipro revenues had risen to $3.47 billion – a 41% increase over the same period in 2006. The firm is an acclaimed high-tech trendsetter. It received the accolade most prized by true business cognoscenti: becoming the subject of a Harvard Business School case study. The school examined how Wipro applied the principles of Toyota’s “Lean” production system to its operations. So who is Wipro, what does the company do, and how did it become so successful so fast? getAbstract recommends that executives and managers read this book to discover the answers. Learn how your company can adopt the Wipro Way to turbocharge its operations.

Summary

India's High-Tech Tigers

With its huge population, long tradition of superior education, well-trained and industrious workforce, and highly competitive labor costs, India is quickly becoming an economic powerhouse. Today, more than 800,000 Indian engineers work worldwide, and another 400,000 Indians are employed in business process outsourcing (BPO) activities of all types. The Internet has enabled Indian firms to handle much of the world's accounting, order-taking, credit-checking and other services with great efficiency.

Wipro – An Indian Icon

In 1966, Western India Vegetable Products was in the business of manufacturing oils and cakes from peanuts. Azim Premji, a Stanford-educated engineer, inherited the company when his father died suddenly, and immediately began to transform it. The first thing he looked at was the way the company evaluated the peanuts it bought from farmers. Buyers had been estimating the quality of the peanuts by biting into them. Premji introduced a scientific method of sampling the nuts – and profits immediately rose. Following the example of Western companies at the time, he then began to diversify, getting into soaps and industrial...

About the Author

Business journalist Steve Hamm works at Business Week, where he is an award-winning senior writer and the editor for software issues.

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