 "I am going to work on technology roadmap for Wipro: T K Kurien")
"There were one or two bets which we took that were wrong," says Kurien in an interview with RAGHU KRISHNAN and ALNOOR PEERMOHAMED.
Edited Excerpts.
Are you satisfied with your performance in the last five years ?
When I got the company, it was in a very different stage. There was a leadership crisis. The first question I was asked is how many people are going to leave the company? Soon after I took over, I got a call from an headhunter asking me do you know how many CVs are floating from Wipro. I said 1,000. He said, 30,000. that is the scale of the crisis. Today, in the eyes of the competition, there is tremendous respect that we can win deals. Our win ratios have gone up significantly.
There were one or two bets which we took that were wrong. In hindsight, everything looks right. But the energy and utility bets that we took I don't think anybody had anticipated that energy and utility would go this way. We have built a great business. We have a built a fabulous business. Today, it is 16.9 per cent of our topline. But the downside of this is that it exposes you to cyclicality. The cyclicality would not have shown up if we had grown our banking and financial services business
Our banking business grew significantly, but our insurance business remained absolutely flat. And we were not able to do anything substantial in insurance. That is a regret. Besides that, I look at CEO's tenure in two phases: One is what you do and what your successor is. How quickly is the transition happening. how does the new person succeed and work in the future. The succession has gone of incredibly.
With changes such as cloud and Artificial intelligence, how is Wipro adapting?
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Every time the industry change, like an Amoeba, you have to embrace the change and make it your food. If you don't embrace and make the foreign particle part of your food chain, you will die as a company. You can't resist change, you will die.And that is why an amoeba has survived and a lot of organisms haven't . For us, that is the ability. The ability for companies of our size is going to. Our success is going to be determined by how quickly we can change ourselves rather than resist change. That is a massive quality for an organization, and that is exactly what Abid will drive it here.
In the last decade, whenever there is a crisis in the western markets, we have seen more outsourcing happening?
Yes, but in a different form. So 15 years ago, when you walked into a manufacturer, they would say IT costs would be 4.5-5%. Today, if you go and ask them about their IT costs, they will see 1.5-2%. So, it has already come down. From this, the extra headspace you need to get to create more opportunities is limited.
So you go after IT itself and if you keep banging your head against the IT shop, you will get incremental business.I think the opportunity is out of IT. So for example, process technologies, operations technologies, I think there's a big opportunity out there.
Have you been able to build patents, IP in those areas?
Those areas are about deployment of technology first. Today, they haven't invested in technology uniformly across the enterprise in a big way. It's still been very spotty in the way they've done it and most cases automation has been done, it's been based on closed systems.
Let me give you an example. If I'm buying a steel plant, the guy who supplies you the smelter will have his own technology, the guy who supplies the management systems will have a separate system and all systems are closed.
More and more open systems are going to come in. So when open systems come in, you're going to have a big push for technology going into operations. On top of this it's going to be an overlay of IoT that's going to come in. And I think that's the big area of opportunity for Indian IT at least.
Are Indian IT companies geared up for this shift?
See, no company is going to get killed.
Do you feel that Wipro is seen as a laggard when compared to your peers in terms of growth?
Certainly. But we missed the trick several years ago, it wasn't a new trick. So if you look at the biggest growth people have had, it's come from banking and financial services. You look at banking and financial services, Cognizant grew at 18 per cent last year, TCS grew 12 per cent, we grew single digits.
Now you break up the portfolio and ask yourself, which components of the portfolio have not grown. You break up banking, we've grown above 15 per cent. One segment of the market we've not grown at all is the insurance segment for the past 5 years. Zero growth. That has dragged us down completely.
So if components of your portfolio don't fire, if insurance had fired 10 per cent, we would have still been better off. So those are the components we can't change today, because out of the top five insurance companies in Europe, we now have one. Now, and this is this year. In the top five insurance companies in the US, we have none. In the top five insurance companies in Asia-Pacific, we have none.
What is the way forward for TK Kurien?
Couple of things. First Abid is going to run the company, I'm very clear about that. My job is going to be, there are basically two things I'm going to do. One is that Abid will need some hand holding when it comes to customer relationships, because a lot of the customer relationships are mine, a significant portion of them in Wipro. So I want to make sure there's an orderly transition of that into Abid.
The second thing is I'm also going to work on a technology roadmap for Wipro, and what it means for customers.What it means for us in terms of implication. What are the new skills we have to build, what are the new markets we have to address, right? So that's broadly one area I'm going to look at, and I think it's an area that's going to be interesting and it's an area we can do a lot of work in terms of scale.