The story of India through Powerful leaders
By siliconindia   |   Saturday, 13 August 2011, 02:36 IST
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Azim Premji: M.H.Hasham Premji the founder of Wipro in 1945 started his business in Amalner, Maharashtra, producing sunflower Vanaspati oil and soaps. The company was known as Western India Vegetable Products Limited, later abbreviated as Wipro. Wipro's company's logo is a sunflower to reflect their original business and later got diversified into wax, and tin containers for packaging and crushing industries. Hasham Premji died in 1966, and was succeeded by his son Azim Premji who is the founder of Wipro technologies. When Azim bagged the seat of the chairperson Wipro was dealing with cooking fats and later, bakery fats, ethnic ingredient based toiletries, haircare soaps, baby toiletries, lighting products, and hydraulic cylinders. Premji shift the focus from soaps and made it Wipro products limited, Wipro technologies and Wipro Corporation. Under Azim's administration there was a drastic development and expansion was observed. In 1975, Wipro Fluid Power business unit manufacturing hydraulic cylinders and truck tippers was started. And in 1976, he founded Wintrol - the precursor to Wipro Infrastructure Engineering.
In 1980s Wipro stepped into the IT sector and by giving a tough competition to IBM. Wipro got into the manufacturing of computer hardware, software development and many others. The company's turn over from $1.5 million to $6 Billion, this is a great diversification. Today, Wipro is the third largest IT services company in India and the company employs more than 122,385 people around the globe. According to a Forbes study, Premji is the third wealthiest Indian with a personal wealth of $16.8 billion.

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