Wipro Limited
Information Technology Services and ConsultingFounded 1945- Updated July 2025
Reviewed by Swet Parvadiya
Last reviewed: July 2025
CorpDigest
Wipro Limited
Company History
Founded 1945 in Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
Last reviewed: 2025-07-15 · By Swet Parvadiya
Mohamed Hasham Premji registered the company as Western India Palm Refined Oils in Amalner, Maharashtra in 1945, manufacturing cooking fats and toiletries. The business operated within the constraints of post-independence India's command economy, where operating licenses determined what you could make and in what quantities, and foreign exchange controls limited technology imports.
Azim Premji took control in 1966 when his father died unexpectedly, dropping out of Stanford University to return to India. He spent the first decade simply keeping the company alive and profitable — no grand technology pivot, just careful management of a manufacturing business in a difficult regulatory environment. The technology diversification came gradually: computing hardware distribution in the late 1970s, then hardware manufacturing under a government license in 1984, then software development as Indian engineers proved they could produce quality work at substantially lower cost than Western developers.
The Y2K boom of the late 1990s was the moment that put Wipro and the broader Indian IT services industry on Western corporate radar. American companies facing year-2000 date conversion problems hired Indian developers by the thousands. Wipro's revenues and headcount grew rapidly, and the relationships built during Y2K created the client pipelines that sustained growth into the 2000s.
The company's product engineering and research development services division — building embedded software for semiconductor chips, aerospace systems, and automotive electronics — represents a higher-value segment that Wipro has developed over years of specialization. These aren't commodity IT maintenance contracts; they require domain expertise that takes years to accumulate and creates genuine switching costs.
Mohamed Hasham Premji founded Wipro in 1945 as a vegetable oil refining company in western India, recognizing the massive domestic demand for edible oils in the post-colonial era. Under his leadership, the company grew into a diversified consumer goods manufacturer, producing soaps, candles, and lighting products. Although it was his son, Azim Premji, who ultimately orchestrated the radical pivot into information technology, Hasham Premji's foundational emphasis on operational discipline, quality control, and navigating the complex bureaucratic landscape of the License Raj established the corporate DNA that would allow Wipro to survive and thrive in the highly competitive global technology sector. His legacy is one of building a resilient, diversified industrial base from the ground up in a challenging economic environment.
Mohamed Hasham Premji establishes the company in Mumbai, focusing on the production and refining of hydrovanaspati cooking oil.
Following the sudden death of his father, 21-year-old Azim Premji leaves Stanford University to take over the struggling family business, initiating a new era of strategic expansion.
Wipro begins its transition into the technology sector by securing a license to import and assemble minicomputers, partnering with Control Data Corporation.
The company officially establishes its IT division, marking the beginning of its strategic pivot from consumer goods and hardware manufacturing to software development and services.
Wipro capitalizes on the massive global demand for software engineers to fix the millennium bug, experiencing explosive revenue growth and establishing its dominance in the Global Delivery Model.
Wipro acquires the Indian operations of SpectraMind, significantly boosting its capabilities in enterprise software integration and establishing a foothold in the high-value consulting market.
In a massive $500 million deal, Wipro acquires the US-based cloud consulting firm Appirio, drastically accelerating its cloud-native capabilities and expanding its footprint in the North American market.
The company announces a comprehensive strategic overhaul, focusing on digital transformation, cloud engineering, and AI, aiming to accelerate growth and improve operating margins.
Srini Pallia is appointed as CEO, tasked with accelerating the Wipro 3.0 strategy, navigating the generative AI disruption, and driving high-margin digital engineering growth.
To acquire deep expertise in enterprise software integration, middleware, and application modernization, significantly boosting Wipro's capabilities in the high-value consulting and systems integration market.
To acquire a massive US-based IT infrastructure outsourcing and data center management business, drastically expanding Wipro's footprint in the North American market and its capabilities in cloud infrastructure and data center migration.
To acquire a premier US-based cloud consulting firm with deep expertise in Salesforce, Workday, and cloud-native architecture, drastically accelerating Wipro's digital transformation capabilities and expanding its footprint in the North American market.
To acquire a leading German IT services provider with deep expertise in the automotive, manufacturing, and logistics sectors, significantly strengthening Wipro's product engineering capabilities and its foothold in the European market.
Wipro was founded in 1945 by Mohamed Hasham Premji in Amalner, a small town in Maharashtra, under the name Western India Palm Refined Oils Limited. The original business processed groundnut oil and vanaspati for the Indian domestic market, with the flagship Sunflower Vanaspati brand and 787 laundry soap as early consumer products. The company operated as a regional commodity processor for two decades, with revenues measured in lakhs rather than crores, and had no connection to technology. The transition began after Mohamed Premji's sudden death in 1966, when his 21-year-old son Azim Hasham Premji left Stanford University mid-degree to take charge of the family enterprise. Shareholders at the first general meeting under Azim Premji openly questioned whether a college dropout could run the company, with one investor reportedly demanding he sell his shares. Azim Premji renamed the entity Wipro Products Limited in 1977 and Wipro Limited in 1982, diversifying into hydraulic cylinders, lighting, and consumer toiletries before pivoting decisively into information technology. The Amalner cooking oil origin remains visible today through Wipro Consumer Care, which still sells Santoor soap and Yardley brands as part of a roughly $1.3 billion FMCG segment alongside the IT services giant.
The pivot began in 1981 when Azim Premji entered the minicomputer business after IBM was forced out of India in 1977 by the Janata government's foreign exchange regulations, leaving a vacuum in domestic hardware. Wipro Information Technology Limited was incorporated to manufacture minicomputers under a technology partnership with Sentinel Computer Corporation of the United States, and the first Wipro 86 minicomputer shipped in 1981 from Bengaluru. Through the 1980s the company built peripherals, printers, and PCs sold under the Wipro brand in the domestic market. The services business began in earnest in 1990 when Wipro started offering software development on contract, initially to General Electric, which became a defining client through the 1990s GE Medical Systems joint venture in 1990 with a forty-nine percent Wipro stake. The Y2K wave of 1998 to 2000 transformed Wipro from a hardware-led Indian company into a global services exporter, and the May 2000 American Depositary Receipt listing on the New York Stock Exchange raised the international profile dramatically. By 2005 information technology services represented roughly seventy percent of consolidated revenue, and the cooking oil origin had become a historical footnote rather than a business line.
Wipro relocated its corporate headquarters from Amalner to Bengaluru in the early 1980s when Azim Premji decided that the technology business required proximity to Karnataka's emerging electronics ecosystem rather than the agro-processing belt of north Maharashtra. The Karnataka state government had aggressively courted electronics manufacturers since the late 1970s, building Electronics City on the southern outskirts of Bengaluru in 1978 as an industrial park reserved for technology firms. Wipro established its Doddakannelli campus on Sarjapur Road in Bengaluru, which today houses more than fifteen thousand employees and serves as the global headquarters. The city offered three structural advantages that Amalner could not match: a deep pool of engineering graduates from the Indian Institute of Science, the University Visvesvaraya College of Engineering, and dozens of regional engineering colleges; access to Hindustan Aeronautics, Bharat Electronics, and Indian Telephone Industries, the public-sector electronics giants that had trained generations of hardware engineers; and a moderate climate suited to early data center operations before industrial air conditioning was reliable. Mumbai was considered but rejected because it was dominated by financial services and trading, while Bengaluru was already becoming the de facto Indian Silicon Valley alongside competitors such as Infosys, which had also relocated to the city in 1983.
Three generations of the Premji family have controlled and managed Wipro across nearly eight decades. Mohamed Hasham Premji, the founder, ran the cooking oil business from 1945 until his death in 1966 and established the family's commercial reputation in western Maharashtra. Azim Hasham Premji, the second generation, took over at age twenty-one in 1966 and led the company for fifty-three years as managing director and then chairman until he formally retired from executive duties on July 30, 2019, making him one of the longest-serving founder-led chief executives in Indian corporate history. Rishad Premji, Azim's elder son, joined Wipro in 2007 after stints at Bain and Company and GE Capital, became chief strategy officer in 2015, and was named executive chairman on July 31, 2019, succeeding his father in the boardroom while professional chief executives ran operations. The family holds roughly seventy percent of Wipro's equity through a network of investment vehicles including Azim Premji Trust and Hasham Investment, which is the largest single founder-family stake among major Indian information technology firms. The Premji household has remained based in Bengaluru, and the family is known for an austere personal style despite the multibillion-dollar fortune, with Azim Premji famously continuing to fly economy class on domestic Indian flights well into his seventies.
Wipro's first equity issue traced back to a 1947 listing on the Bombay Stock Exchange under the original Western India Vegetable Products name, although trading was thin for decades because the Premji family held the overwhelming majority of stock. The modern public profile began with successive bonus issues and stock splits through the 1980s and 1990s that broadened the float. The defining capital markets moment was the American Depositary Receipt issue on the New York Stock Exchange on October 19, 2000, at the tail end of the dot-com boom, which valued the company at roughly $30 billion at debut and briefly made Azim Premji the third-wealthiest person in the world on paper. The ADR raised approximately $130 million in fresh capital and gave Wipro a global currency for acquisitions and employee stock options denominated in dollars. The Bombay Stock Exchange and National Stock Exchange listings remained the primary trading venues by volume, and Wipro has executed two major buybacks worth roughly 11,000 crore rupees in 2019 and 2020, partially because the Premji family preferred returning capital rather than paying out the cash in dividends taxed at higher rates. The shares trade today under the WIT ticker on the New York Stock Exchange and WIPRO on the National Stock Exchange of India.