BENGALURU: When Thierry Delaporte was announced the CEO and MD of Wipro in July 2020, Rishad Premji, Chairman, Wipro, had said he would be the right person to lead the company in the next phase of growth.
Delaporte had said “I look forward to building a better tomorrow for all its stakeholders.” Since 2020, the value of the company’s stock and market capitalisation grew by 2.5X. But the Frenchman could not complete his five-year tenure and as Peter Bendor- Samuel, CEO of Everest Group, a research firm, puts it, “As a European it was difficult to win the hearts and minds of a traditional Indian IT services firm and this undoubtedly also contributed to flagging morale.”
Delaporte undertook a significant transformation of Wipro, he invested in consulting, reorganised, and upgraded the talent. His goal was to reorient Wipro from a firm mostly focused on providing services that reduced cost of IT and tech services to one which focused on both costs take out and on creating value from technology and tech services. “This transformation was broad-based as well as internally painful and was complicated by the fact that it was undertaken during the pandemic. The advent of generative AI along with the post Covid and tech pull back has occurred whilst Wipro was in the middle of this transformation and has contributed to the poor performance relative to rest of the industry that Wipro has experienced,” he told TNIE.
Delaporte’s significant achievements in bringing new capabilities, and streamlining the organisation are balanced by slower growth, and below industry profit than other industry peer companies and continued execution issues with deteriorating morale. He is clearly leaving Wipro better positioned and with the start of a strong foundation, However, he will be disappointed not to have finished the transformation and got Wipro back to its old position as an industry leader, the CEO of Everest Group said.
In his mail, Delaporte said that he was proud of what they have achieved over the last four years, growing revenues by 35%. “We’ve generated 25% more profit in the last four years than in the previous 4-year period,” he told employees. Also, he made 12 acquisitions. The company is promoting its internal talent, and analysts say new CEO Srinivas Pallia is a good bet.