Wipro plans major expansion in India

Sufia Tippu
Thursday, 15 June 2006 17:49

IT Industry - Market

India’s third largest software exporter, Wipro Technologies has outlined major expansion plans in the southern port city of Chennai.

Immediately after the first ever visit to Wipro's home base of Bangalore by the chief minister of the state of Tamil Nadu, M Karunanidhi, early this morning, Wipro chairman, Azim Premji, said "a significant amount of investment is being planned in Tamil Nadu."

The 80-year-old CM has come to Bangalore to "see the magic that has happened here and try to replicate the same in Chennai," said Premji.

“We are drafting a new policy which would be soon finalized so that it would attract more software investments in our state,” said Karunanidhi, flanked by his great-nephew, Dayanidhi Maran, who is currently the Union IT and Communications minister in New Delhi.

Chennai is becoming a telecom hub with Nokia, Flextronics, Foxconn and Motorola setting up large scale manufacturing facilities.

Wipro Technologies which has a headcount close to 55,000,  has around 5000 people in a facility in Chennai. Apart from this, its group company, Wipro Infotech which is the domestic arm of Wipro has an assembly plant in Pondicherry, near Chennai.

“The government has promised us land allocation and we will be taking them up on this. We will be looking at software development as well business process outsourcing (BPO) operations in Chennai,” Premji said.

In Bangalore, allocation of land has always been a problem with both Wipro and Infosys waiting in queue for large acreage of land to be allocated to them so that expansion can take place.

Apart from this, the infrastructure issue too has been drawing a lot of flak and the CEOs of leading companies have gone on record to say that they would move to other states if the issue  of poor roads and traffic jams were not taken up seriously by the government.

Wipro has recently been in the news, taking over smaller US and EU-based companies, strengthening its “string of pearls” strategy and has till now spent close to $300 million in acquisitions alone.

And, like  other leading Indian services companies, it has been growing at over 30%t year on year and expanding to other cities like Hyderabad in the state of Andhra Pradesh and  Kolkata in the eastern state of West Bengal.