Wipro plans further expansion in Chennai

Wipro Technologies is set to make its Sholinganallur facility near Chennai the single largest facility of the company so far.

The move is in line with the company's strategy to sustain its aggressive expansion and hiring drive in the city through 2007, with a view to increasing the employee retention and leveraging new workforce streams.

The company will upgrade the number of seats at the 102-acre facility to 7,500 from the current 4,500 seats, in two phases.

The company expects to have 18,000 people working out of the Sholinganallur facility in the next three years, Chandrasekar Dharuman, vice-president and location head, Wipro Technologies, told a press conference. The work on the facility would be completed this year.

While the current facility is on 20 acres of land, Wipro is in the process of developing an additional 82 acres, Dharuman said.

Wipro expects to have almost 9,000 seats operational at its four centres out of Chennai -- at Guindy, Sholinganallur, Teynampet and Pallikaranai -- in the next three years. An additional 300 seats are planned at Wipro's 300-seat Pallikaranai facility this year.

At the Mahindra World City, where Infosys has about 2,000 people on its rolls, Wipro will start the construction work on its next facility on a 95-acre plot this year. Seven acres of land have also been acquired in Coimbatore for future expansion, Dharuman said.

"In the next four months, we will add at least 4,000 people in Tamil Nadu of which at least 2,000 will be from Tamil Nadu engineering colleges," he added.

Tamil Nadu contributes about 25 per cent of Wipro's campus talent pool and the Wipro Academy of Software Excellence has been seeing its highest intake of students from the state.

The attrition rate in Chennai, at 12.5 per cent in the quarter to December 31, 2006, has been markedly lower than the overall attrition rate of the company which is 14 per cent.Wipro currently has a headcount of 66,176 employees. Its four centres in Chennai accommodate over 7,000 people currently.

Engineering services (R&D) has been a strong contributor to Wipro's top line, accounting for over 20 per cent of the company's total revenues since 2002. R&D services contributed almost 30 per cent of Wipro's revenues in 2005-06, and the IT major's Chennai centres currently have about 3,000 staff engaged in product engineering and development.

Wipro's $28-million acquisition of mPower in 2005, helped it add 300 people to its rolls, and strengthen its application development and maintenance, infrastructure services and packaged software implementation delivery out of Chennai for its customers in the financial services sector.