Wipro Infotech, the Bangalore, India-based hardware, software and services company, plans to ramp up its presence in the European services market, from which it hopes to earn $100m in revenues by 2001. It will concentrate on IT consultancy, outsourcing, software products and systems integration. The company will also focus its energies on the retail/utilities, manufacturing, healthcare and telecommunications sectors, with plans to provide consulting on European Monetary Union, E-commerce, ERP and financials projects. This will bring it into stiff competition from the increasing number of American and European services firms in the market. It has limited Year 2000 work to 10% of its business but hopes that the Euro and E-commerce work will be its market drivers. Faced with a wealth of competitors, the company hopes to win contracts on the basis of past success and claims that 65% of its projects are completed on time, compared with an industry average of 20%. The company’s advantage also lies within the speed it can begin even large projects, having 5,000 staff in India trained in legacy systems and new technologies. The company also promises lower prices, with the lower costs of operating out of India. Wipro Infotech’s aim is to gain 75% of its business in Europe through winning its own contracts and 25% by partnering with other services companies, such as Cap Gemini, EDS and Logica. Ashok Soota, Wipro Infotech group president, said that the market demand is large and growing fast enough to allow the company to hit these targets, claiming that the shortage of skilled IT staff means that services firms need to call on Wipro Infotech to meet their own contracts. Wipro Infotech, which has 11 development centers in India and 2 in the US, is planning to open one in Europe in the next twelve months. Wipro Infotech generates 51% of the sales of diversified conglomerate Wipro Holdings but it currently has no plans to float from the parent company.
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