Wipro on Wednesday, January 12, was the first among India’s IT larger companies to announce its results, with the company reporting a net profit of Rs 2,969 crore for the October-December 2021 quarter. Wipro’s net profit is flat as compared to the same quarter last year. Last year, Wipro earned Rs 2,968 crore as net profit in Q3 2021. Its consolidated revenue was Rs 20,313 crore, up by 29.6% year-on-year. Its IT services revenue grew 27.5% year-on-year.
Giving its outlook for the final quarter, Wipro said it expects revenue from the IT services business to see sequential growth of 2-4%.
CEO Thierry Delaporte, in a statement, said, “Wipro has delivered a fifth consecutive quarter of strong performance, both on revenues, and margins. Order bookings have been strong too, and we have added seven new customers in the more than $100 Mn revenue league, in the last 12 months. Our strategy and improved execution continue to serve us well, and we are confident of building on this momentum.
Attrition climbed to 22.7% on a trailing twelve month basis, up from 20.5% last quarter. Wipro had 2,37,671 employees for IT services at the end of quarter, a net increase of 10,306 employees during the quarter. Salary increases had been rolled out to employees in September 2021, which the company said covered 80% of the employees.
Speaking to the press, CEO Thierry Delaporte said the company is on track to hire 70% more freshers from campus in FY22 as compared to the previous year. Addressing the attrition numbers, he said that it is high across the sector and while the company had previously said that it would take a few more quarters for the numbers to come down, he said they expect attrition to moderate next quarter.
Chief Human Resources Officer Saurabh Govil said that they believe the attrition will stabilise by next quarter, and that the rate of growth of attrition has reduced. Attrition mainly is in high-growth areas such as data, cloud and engineering, he said. “These are high-growth areas and where we are seeing attrition. The experience level where there is the most attrition is between 3-8 years of experience. These are the two pockets we are trying to focus on and we are trying to see that if we can build a good pipeline of well full-stack trained freshers to take up this over a period of time — from an attrition, growth and cost perspective, it is a plus for the organisation,” he said.
The organisation had set a target of 17,500 freshers to be hired in FY22, of which Govil said they have hired 17,000 so far.
Govil said that there is a supply deficit and in order to mitigate that, they did a second round of salary increases for the employee base in the current quarter, three rounds of promotions for 80% of employees in the last 12 months, and are investing in freshers and upskilling.
For the next fiscal year, Govil said they are looking to hire over 30,000 freshers. “We will continuously be making sure that supply will not be a constraint,” he said.
However, as the number of COVID-19 cases have shot up due to the spread of the Omicron variant, Wipro has decided to shut its offices globally for the next four weeks. In terms of vaccinations, the CEO said that 90% of the employees have received at least one dose of the vaccine, and 65% of employees have received both doses. How the hybrid model of work will pan out will be calibrated keeping in mind the evolving situation, he said.