Star of India Guides It Boom

The 'richest man in India' is in phlegmatic mood. Mention that tag in Azim Premji's company and one gets no glimmer of recognition that this is a description of the man himself. Bring up the startling factoid that in February 2000 he usurped Warren Buffett, Larry Ellison, and the Sultan of Brunei to become, for a sliver of history, the second-richest man in the world, worth some £35 billion, and all you get is a wry smirk. 'I didn't consider it real money. It was just notional wealth,' says Premji.

At that time, shares in Wipro, Premji's company, were just about to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange, a slick marketing move in addition to raising funds for expansion. Wipro's star had risen on the back of the dotcom boom. His Bangalore-based software programming teams and call centres were seen as the spine of the new internet economy. People were India's new spice.

But the difference for Wipro, Infosys and the other leading Indian consultancies is that, although they serviced the dotcom economy, they never adhered to its business model. All have been consistently profitable. Wipro itself has grown by a compound rate of 40 per cent a year since 1966, when Premji took over his father's vegetable oil company. Its clients include Sony, Fiat, Microsoft, Dell, Allianz insurance, Thames Water and the Aberdeen Group. The attraction is India's potent mix of highly skilled, technically qualified, English-speaking graduates.

'I can employ a software engineer in India and give him the same standard of living as in Britain for a sixth of the cost, in purchasing parity terms. So it's inevitable that this shift will take place, as it has happened for manufacturing Britain these days, because there are better places to do it,' he says.

All of which poses some interesting questions for the future of the British economy, but Premji's canvas is a global one. The 'global competitiveness agenda' is so compelling that profitable companies will not be able to avoid shifting back-office business processes abroad, he thinks. centre operators are graduates, which compares favourably with the skills level of call-centre operatives in the US and Europe. Language and technical aptitude are not enough for Premji, however. He recently sent some of his employees to accent-training courses in Texas and New York to offer a hometown-style service for Dell and Lehman Brothers respectively.

But do not imagine his company is merely a global call centre. Premji forced the company to the limit in reaching various obscure quality-assurance kitemarks such as 'Sigma 6' and 'SEI CMM' of which Wipro is the world's first level 5 company. Indian software companies have had to go much further than Western ones just to shock prospective customers into realising their skills. 'We are into IT consulting, we now see our main competitor as Accenture,' he says. Indeed, Microsoft's Bill Gates recently hinted that a Wipro-Microsoft team could outcompete IBM's excellence in consultancy, prompting rumours of a closer relationship with the biggest technology company in the world.

The two men co-operate on their charitable work. 'My foundation is working closely with the Bill Gates Foundation. Our expertise is in primary education and theirs is in health, so we're somewhat complementary,' says Premji. Education is Premji's passion. He had to curtail his own university life at Stanford to rush back to India and take control of Wipro. Now he devotes time to making sure his supply pipe of talented software consultants keeps flowing.

'We aren't coming up against skills constraints, there are still 260,000 software engineers coming out of Indian universities each year. One factor in their acknowledged propensity for technology is that they are willing to continuously learn, unlearn and relearn.' A measure of Wipro's confidence is its move to open up strike-ridden Kolkata, formerly known as Calcutta. The company and the sector are showing increasing signs of maturity, which is good for a man who has ambitions to lead one of the top five software service companies in the world within a few years. Strategy consulting is not on the agenda, nor is the production of branded software. 'Products and services are two completely different businesses with different business models. We have mastered the business of services and view that as our core competence,' he says.

But maturity brings problems. Maturity also means an end to 40 per cent growth rates and exceptional profits. Clients are pushing down prices, seeking to capture more of the cost savings themselves. Western competitors are opening their own facilities in India. And the post-11 September environment has put sand in the wheels of this unstoppable process of globalisation.

New visa restrictions in the US may harm Wipro's ability to do business. In India there is a growing view that this is protectionism by other means. One US state, New Jersey, has passed a law banning outsourcing to Indian IT firms. 'Our industry body is looking into this issue of visas. Our model is 25 per cent of staff onsite, 75 per cent in India,' he says. Premji himself has been on the receiving end of racial profiling during his business trips to the US.

'Since I have come to the US I have gone to airports four times to catch flights and each time I have been profiled because my name shows I am a Muslim,' he told journalists last year, before joking about changing his name. But his name is increasingly known around the world. He has been entertained by Tony Blair and Bill Clinton when he was President, and was visited by Rupert Murdoch on his trip to India, yet Premji could not be more indifferent to the trappings of power. He still drives a six-year-old Ford Escort, travels economy class on internal flights, and packs a travel iron and detergent for washing his clothes.

His legendary parsimony may be down to the fact that he still owns 84 per cent of the company, also the source of his world-beating wealth in 2000. He is believed recently to have slightly diluted his stake through acquisitions of a US consulting firm. Further acquisitions, possibly in Britain, are believed to be in the pipeline. Then again, his asceticism may simply be down to his background as a secular Bohra Indian Muslim who refuses to pay a bribe in a country riddled with corruption. Perhaps this is the influence of Gandhi, who alongside Bill Gates and Jack Welch top his list of heroes.

Last week he took his take on human development to the World Bank, delivering the keynote speech at its conference on development economics. He was happy to relay details of the latest 'endogenous growth' theories, but also highlighted the 'frightening disparity' between developing and developed countries. 'A girl born in Japan today may have a 50 per cent chance of seeing the 22nd century - while a newborn in Afghanistan has a one in four chance of dying before age five,' he pointed out to the Bangalore conference. His vision is of a revolution in primary education and information kiosks bringing the Indian technology dream to every village and every farmer across the giant country.

As he says: 'My sincere belief is that development and deployment of the right talent can soon push India to that long-awaited status of being a developed economy.'

An optimistic vision, perhaps, but worth watching out for.

· What they say

Soon it will be common sense when a complex project is to be delivered to say 'How about we talk to Wipro about this?'

Bill Gates, Microsoft president

He has as much humility as Oracle's Larry Ellison has showmanship

Rene Carayol, author of Corporate Voodoo

By taking Wipro to the world stage he's pulled off the almost impossible

Sir Iain Vallance, former chairman BT/CBI

· Profile

Name Azim Hashim Premji

Job Founder-chairman, Wipro

Born Bombay, 1945

Family Married to Yasmin, two sons - Rishad and Tariq

Education Stanford University

Net worth Around £4 billion

Hobbies Jogging, educational charities, recently took up golf