Wipro Lines Up New B2b Venture

Highly-placed company officials said the new venture will be headed by Suresh Vaswani -- currently the chief executive of Wipro Technologies. The name of the new business is expected to be zero1market.com. The site is likely to be launched soon.

The company has entered into technology alliances with Vignette, OpenMarkets and Ariba and these tie-ups are helping Wipro get new businesses.

Wipro was the first software services company in the world to achieve Level 5 under the Software Engineering Institute's Capability Maturity Model.

To gear up to a fast-changing environment, Wipro has streamlined the organisation. It now has three groups in the Wipro infotech division focusing on the customer. The enterprise products team focuses on hardware while the solutions and services team focuses on providing applications and systems integration services from the enterprise layer into the Internet layer.

 

Wipro is expected to achieve a 60-70 per cent revenue growth during 2000-2001. The company has developed expertise in wireless, WAP and Bluetooth areas and expects to get significant businesses in these areas in future.

A Merill Lynch report said the company has been able to drive its billing rates up and expects an offshore rate of about $50,000 on an annualised basis compared with $43,000 during 1999-2000. It said it expects its offshore average rates to increase by about 20 per cent year-on-year basis during 2000-2001.

The report also said the company expects Internet and e-commerce to account for about 15 per cent of its total revenues compared with 8 per cent during 1999-2000.

During 1999-2000, Wipro Ltd posted a profit of Rs 248.3 crore, up 121 per cent over the previous year. Profit after tax rose 77 per cent to Rs 300.6 crore. This was mainly because of a good order flow and investments in high technology areas.

Wipro Ltd posted sales and other income of Rs 2,312.90 crore for 1999-2000, thereby recording an increase of 28 per cent over 1998-99. Profit before tax was Rs 350.7 crore during 1999-2000 thereby registering an increase of 99 per cent over the previous year.

Wipro Technologies, posted sales of Rs 1,042 crore, registering an increase of around 65 per cent while profit before interest and tax was Rs 288.70 crore, a growth of 75 per cent over the previous year.

Wipro Infotech posted sales of Rs 825.10 crore during 1999-2000, thereby registering an increase of around 20 per cent over the previous year.

Profit before interest grew by 27 per cent to Rs 43.80 crore during 1999-2000.