Premji: 'Part of It Is Gut Feel'
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| Image: Namas Bhojani for Forbes India | |
Why is it important for Wipro to start diversifying into ecology?
Don’t narrow your perception on what we are trying to do just to diversification. There are other dimensions, as a citizen - ecological sustainability is a global problem but completely unaddressed in India.
Second, every year we set a target for conserving water used by the company. That’s an aggressive target of improvements of about 10-15 percent every year, inspite of more complexities and longer working hours.
Third we see incremental business opportunities that we can create in our existing businesses, like green lighting and green data centers.
On the fourth axis really is how you create a new business like Wipro Water, we see water as an important beachhead where we can build a global business.
As far as renewable energy goes we have identified a very major opportunity called renewable energy, frankly we don’t have a fit of it, what is it wind power, is it solar, is it the blades of wind power plants
You talk about renewable energy, but you say that you haven’t decided which of these you will back. What will be the criteria if you have to choose one, say wind over water or bio-fuel?
I would assume that one of the big criteria will be the scalability of the market. Second is the kind of returns that you will make on the investment. Three it will be differentiating technology. It has to be of a significant size of business for it to make worthwhile for us, because our scale of operations has become so large now. If something is very sidey, it is not going to be of interest to us.
But what will really Wipro bring to the table which will help you compete successfully?
Oh most certainly, better management. It will be a differentiating factor. Two, The players that are here today are reasonably large, except in wind power. But we have a strong brand and just like we found in IT, being an Indian company is no disadvantage even when compared to IBM. If you are able to give a good solution the customer will be willing to pay you. Three, we will hopefully be able to put together a differentiated strategy, product or service.
You also talked about getting into manufacturing, why is that?
Because technology is embedded in manufacturing and if you buy from someone else generally he would capture the customer. India is becoming globally competitive when it comes to manufacturing. And a well run Indian plant will be able to benchmark with the best in the industry. If you talk to Nokia you will understand that their productivity in the Indian plant is equal to the best in the world. Same thing with Bosch, they are benchmarking the new Indian plants with the best of German plants. And German plants are extremely productive in terms of man hours, maybe not in terms of cost per man.
Would you also look at GE for your energy and ecology business as a partner?
Downstream yes, but we want to have a strong beachhead. I believe that once we have established ourselves our negotiations with our partners is strong.
What would you describe as maturity in this case?
Scale, size, customer loyalties and understanding of technology. The interesting thing now is that good technology is becoming available from much smaller companies because of all the extra venture capital funds and PE funds coming into renewable energy. It has today the highest investment market share globally of any sector.
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