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 | | Friday, 18 January, 2002, 11:10 GMT Wipro continues to grow  By Sanjeev Srivastava in Bombay Leading Indian software exporter, Wipro, has reported a 17.5% jump in profits, disappointing analysts who had hoped for better. Net profits at Wipro, India's largest software company by stock market value, hit 2.2 bn rupees in the October-to-December quarter. Revenue hit 8.76bn rupees, 12.0% up on a year before. The data disappointed traders, who marked down Wipro stock 5% on Friday morning. New operations In a separate interview with the BBC's World Business Report, Wipro's vice chairman Vivek Paul admits there is still market uncertainty but he believes that what we are "seeing is that September 11 has pretty much worked its way through the system and is gone, we did have some concern on the part of our customers. He added: "It is best to let things settle down a couple more months and then make an outlook call." The company announced it had opened four customer-dedicated development centres over the quarter and attracted 27 new clients. The company also added 91 professionals to its nearly 9,000 strong workforce, 20% of which works on client sites outside India.
In a statement Wipro chairman Azim Premji, India's richest man, said the company had continued to grow ahead of the industry average last year. "Our results for the quarter were in line with our expectations in an environment of enhanced economic turbulence," he said. The firm managed a rise in both its offshore and onsite billing rates. Telecoms squeeze Wipro's Vivek Paul also warned of weak telecoms business," which is likely to decline further in this quarter". Many of the firm's major clients are in this sector. Wipro bagged a $70m contract last year from the telecoms subsidiary of UK-based Lattice Group. Telecoms firms Alcatel, Lucent Technologies and Nortel are also amongst Wipro's top 20 clients. However, the company's strategy of diversifying out of North America-which accounts for nearly 70% of the business of Indian technology firms-seems to be paying off. The company's revenues from IT sales to Europe grew in the October-to-December quarter last year to 42%. A year ago Europe contributed 28% to Wipro's IT revenues. | |
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