BENGALURU: IT services giant Wipro Ltd on Tuesday posted 35 per cent rise in consolidated net profit to Rs 2,552.7 crore for the second quarter ended September 30.
The company had registered a net profit of Rs 1,889 crore in the year-ago period. Its total income for September quarter stood at 15,875.4 crore compared to 15,203.2 crore a year ago.
The Bengaluru-based company's revenue came in 4 per cent higher year-on-year at Rs 1,51,25.6 crore. Wipro has guided for 0.8-2.8 per cent sequential growth in IT service revenue for December quarter, saying revenue from that business is expected to be USD 2,065-2,106 million.
For the just concluded quarter, the company's IT services segment revenue was at USD 2,048.9 million, an increase of 2.5 per cent year-on-year, a Wipro statement said. The operating margin for IT services in the just-ended quarter improved year-on-year to 18.1 per cent. The net income at Rs 2,552.7 crore, translated into 35.1 per cent increase.
Commenting on the earning scorecard, Abidali Z Neemuchwala, Wipro's CEO and Managing Director said: "We had a good in-quarter execution on both revenues and margins, considering the slow start to the fiscal. The overall growth was broad based with 6 out of 7 industry verticals growing on a year on year basis.
Neemuchwala said that the demand environment remained unchanged for IT spends though there was an overhang of macro uncertainty in certain sectors. "We continue to see a robust pipeline and the momentum of order book in Q2 has been better than Q1. India and middle east restructuring is on track and is reflected in some of the deals that we announced like ICICI," he said.
He said the company signed a large deal in India aligned to its strategy of taking global offerings to India customers.
Speaking about the digital sector, the Wipro CEO said the companys global investments in digital created the requisite presence, experience and scale to support transformation not just in the core markets but also in the growing markets.
"We are winning integrated, transformational deals in Canada, Australia, APAC and, of course, in our key markets of US and UK. Our digital revenue grew seven per cent Quarter on Quarter and 29 per cent in Year-on-Year and now contributes 39.6 per cent of our revenues," Neemuchwala said.
Jatin Dalal, Chief Financial Officer of Wipro, said the company delivered operating margins in a tight range after absorbing the impact of two months of wage hike. "Growth remains our priority and we remain invested for future. We also successfully completed the share buyback programme in September, which saw strong participation from our investors," Dalal said.
A Wipro statement said during the quarter ended September 30, 2019, the company concluded buyback of 323.1 million equity shares as approved earlier by the Board of Directors at their meeting on April 16, 2019. "This has resulted in a total cash outflow of Rs 10,500 crore (USD 1.49 billion)," it said.
The company has revamped the engineering services offering and relaunched Wipros Engineering NXT, aimed at leveraging the IP driven solutions, rigorous engineering processes and a new age crowdsource and global shore delivery models across connected products, software, wireless, data platforms, IoT and Industry 4.0.