India's Wipro reports quarterly profit up 41%

Wipro, one of India's biggest outsourcing exporters by sales, reported Thursday quarterly net profit jumped 41 percent as clients increased spending on the back of a pick-up in the global economy. For the financial fourth quarter ended March 31, Wipro's net profit totalled 22.3 billion rupees ($371 million) on revenues that climbed 22 percent to 117.04 billion rupees. Billionaire Wipro chairman Azim Premji, India's richest tech tycoon, said the technology services company's quarterly profit was helped by "the steady improvement in the global economy". The profit outpaced market expectations of 21 billion rupees. Earnings of Wipro's rivals, Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services, have also been boosted by reviving demand in their key US and European markets. "We saw strong deal closure in the fourth quarter, with our order book being one of the highest we have ever seen," Wipro chief executive T.K. Kurien told reporters in the company's home city of Bangalore. But the firm, which has been decentralising its operations to become more swift in decision-making, forecast quarter-on-quarter revenue growth for the three months to June of around zero to two percent. The first quarter of the financial year is traditionally a higher-spending one by clients and analysts had been hoping for a prediction of up to four percent quarter-on-quarter revenue growth. The revenue "guidance was slightly disappointing", said Dipen Shah, head of private client group research at Mumbai's Kotak Securities. But Shah added the company's revenue "growth trajectory has improved in the past few quarters". Wipro, which has been seeking to be more aggressive as it struggles to gain back market share lost to rivals, said the results were calculated according to Indian accounting standards. As part of Wipro's reorganisation, it spun off its non-IT business into unlisted Wipro Enterprises and the company now trades on the stock exchange as a pure IT share. India's flagship outsourcing industry has posted generally robust profits for the final quarter of the last financial year to March 2014. But the companies have been generally muted in their revenue outlook for the first quarter of this financial year to March 2015, disappointing some investors who had been hoping for a dramatic upturn.