Wipro Q1 profit up 30 percent on new contract wins

BANGALORE/MUMBAI (Reuters) - Wipro Ltd , India's third-biggest IT services exporter, posted a 29.6 percent rise in fiscal first-quarter profit and forecast a surge in revenue on the back of stronger spending on outsourcing by overseas clients.

Bangalore-based Wipro, which inked a 10-year deal to manage IT outsourcing of Canadian energy and utilities firm Atco on Friday, said it expected IT services sales in this quarter to grow between 1.7 and 4 percent from the quarter ended June.

IT services revenue in April-June rose 1.2 percent over the previous quarter to $1.7 billion.

"We see a significant rise in business confidence in developed markets as well as India," Wipro's billionaire Chairman Azim Premji said in a statement.

Wipro is part of the $108 billion-a-year Indian outsourcing sector that generates about 90 percent of its revenue from providing services such as IT network installation and the development of software applications for overseas clients that are looking to raise spending on technology.

For the quarter ended June 30, Wipro posted a consolidated net profit of 21.03 billion rupees ($349.9 million), compared with 16.23 billion rupees in the year-ago quarter. Analysts, on average, expected the company to earn 21.24 billion rupees, according to Thomson Reuters data.

Wipro shares ended up 1 percent at 576.85 rupees ahead of the announcement, while the Nifty closed 0.5 percent higher. The stock is up 3.2 percent so far this year, lagging a 24 percent rise in the broader market.

($1 = 60.1100 rupees)

(Reporting by Lehar Maan in BANGALORE and Nivedita Bhattacharjee in MUMBAI; Writing by Devidutta Tripathy; Editing by Miral Fahmy and Mark Potter)