A larger customer base, buoyant economy and weak rupee all contributed to the “decent performance”, as the senior management put it. But it failed to cheer the stock market which has turned nervous in the wake of surging oil prices and interest rates. Wipro’s scrip fell by 5.12% on Wednesday to close at Rs 460.40 on NSE.

Wipro chairman Azim Premji described the quarterly show as “quite satisfying”. “We enhanced our strategic investments to sustain long term growth even as we continued solid execution leading to improvements in operating performance,” he said. Wipro’s added 62 new clients last quarter (including through its acquisitions), 8 of them being Fortune 1000 and Global 500 companies.

While recent acquisitions had a negative impact of 1.2% on the profitability during the quarter, Wipro believes these acquisitions will be beneficial in the long term. As Premji said, “Our exports business continued to witness broad based growth, across verticals, geographies and service lines. In these exciting times, we are well-positioned to benefit from our diversified service portfolio and deep industry expertise. Looking ahead, for the quarter ending September 2006, we are targeting revenues of $577 million.”

Wipro CFO Suresh C Senapaty added that improved price realisations, higher utilisation, and continued improvements in BPO profitability helped in partially offsetting additional investments in sales and marketing and acquisition related pressures on profitability.

“Going forward, size of the acquisitions will be a little bigger than we have been doing in the past,” says chairman Azim Premji.

Source: by times of india