Our resonance with digital customers has increased significantly: Wipro

Post December quarter earnings, Wipro CEO & ED Abidali Z Neemuchwala, CFO Jatin Dalal and President & COO Bhanumurthy BM explain the outlook for the business and various demand drivers in an interview with ETNOW. Excerpts:-

What does your new guidance really mean? Can you elaborate on that?
Abidali Z Neemuchwala: Guidance is always a range, and both cautious and optimism get built into the lower and the upper ends. There is a lot of uncertainty in the environment, whether you look at the macroeconomy, geopolitics, whether it is North America, the US, Mexico, Canada or US-China trade war, if you look at what is happening in West Asia, the auto sector or the US MCA uncertainty. A lot of consumer and other businesses get impacted by US-China tension, or oil and gas gets impacted by West Asia flareup. All of that needs to be baked in, because it is difficult to predict how some of these things pan out. There are good news also, in the uncertainty going away, for example, with Brexit. Because businesses like certainty, they can deal with any answer as long as they know what the answer is. And that is what has happened with Brexit. But in some of the other places, there is still a level of uncertainty which is getting reflected in our guidance.

ET Now: One way or the other everyone is going to ask you about margins: what are you really going to do to improve them going ahead? The last three-four quarters you have had a stable set of margins, of course. The rupee depreciation has really helped you, but what other levers do you really have?
Jatin Dalal: There are multiple levers. If you see our track record, we have delivered in a narrow band. We started with 18.44 the year, then 18.1, then 18.4 again. If I go forward, I see significant investment that we have done as we train our next generation of engineers. We have significant opportunity in automation. We have done industry reading vis-à-vis how we deploy automation in our businesses. We also see premium in pockets for digital and other technologies as opportunities. So, this operating margin is finding pennies wherever you can find and we will continue to find this.

ET Now: Usually this is the time of the year when clients are really finalising their IT budgets. Still I know it is a work in progress. What is the sense do you get for this Calendar? Does it really look healthy?
Bhanumurthy BM: We talked to you about what the environment looks like. Environment uncertainties remain same. So the demand environment has not changed dramatically. It has not become weaker, not become stronger. But a couple of points I would want to mention to you. If you look at all the digital top positions that we have, the resonance with the customers has increased significantly, both in terms of customers who are starting on digital journeys as well as customers who have long become part of the journey and try to industrialise the digital journeys. So, our top positions are becoming stronger. The four big bets that we have taken – digital, cloud, cyber security and engineering – are really the most important activities for most of our customers today.