Wipro board okays `11,000-cr buyback

Company is buying back shares for 2nd year running

India’s third largest software services company Wipro on Thursday announced that the board of directors has approved a proposal to buyback shares worth `11,000 crore at a price of `320 per share.

Speaking about the announcement of buyback of equity shares, Wipro CFO Jatin Dalal said that the announcement to buyback equity shares was a part of the company’s philosophy to deliver efficient returns to shareholders.

“The Board of Directors approved a buyback proposal, subject to the approval of shareholders through postal ballot, for purchase by the company of up to 343.75 million equity shares of `2 each (representing 7.06 per cent of total equity capital) from the shareholders of the company on a proportionate basis by way of a tender offer,” Wipro said.

The Bengaluru-headquartered company also reported a 1.2 per cent growth in its net profit at `2,083 crore during the April-June period as against `2,059 in the same period last year. Wipro’s consolidated revenue stood at `13,626 crore for the same period.

“We delivered revenues above the upper end of the guidance range. Our focus on digital combined with our investments in client mining have resulted in strong growth in top accounts. The brand refresh is reflective of the transformation we are driving at Wipro and how we are helping our customers in their digital journeys,” CEO Abidali Z. Neemuchwala said.

Wipro also announced that it has completed the allotment of bonus equity shares of `2 each in the ratio of 1:1 as announced earlier.

Wipro expects revenues from its IT services to be in the range of $1,962 million to $2,001 million for the quarter ending September.

Talking about the other highlights of the first quarter of the current fiscal, Mr Dalal said that the company’s net addition to headcount was 1,309 in the previous quarter, while the company trained more than 15,000 staff on digital skills.

Having deployed over 2000 Holmes bots across 175 customers, Mr Neemuchwala said that the company has been actively scaling the deployment of its automation platform, Wipro Holmes

“I am happy to report that in Q1 we generated productivity of 2,100 people in the L2 and above bucket,” said Mr Neemuchwala.

According to him, it becomes increasingly easy to automate L1 tasks as the automation programs mature, and the value captured by automating L1 jobs is also relatively low.