Its consolidated revenue for the quarter at Rs 5,966.80 crore saw a growth of 43 per cent over the same quarter last year. 

Despite the challenging milieu of “uncertainty” and “given the headwinds of macroeconomic uncertainty” as Wipro Chairman Azim Premji sought to put it, the first quarter results have been quite satisfying, he said.
In fact, he said, the company’s  IT business notched up an impressive 39 per cent growth in revenues in the reporting quarter at Rs 4,404.5 crore as against Rs 3,159.7 crore in the previous fiscal quarter.
The profit before interest & tax (PBIT) for IT Services alone clocked a 37 per cent growth at Rs 918.6 crore (Rs 669.5 crore previous).

Cautious forecast

Stating that the company’s growth “continues to be driven by its differentiated service lines such as TIS, testing and BPO, Mr Premji said “our focus is to retain close proximity with customers and partner with them in their business priorities.” Despite resilient performance with both healthy topline and bottomline, Mr Premji, in his guidance for the September quarter, however, said, “given the environment we remain cautious in the near-term and expect our revenue from out IT services business to be approximately $1089 million.” He projected a combined revenue of $1.07 billion for the second quarter, marginally ahead of guidance figure of $1.06 billion given earlier.

Elucidating further, Chief Financial Officer Suresh Senapathy said “during the quarter we were able to sustain margins, while rate realisation and utilisation improved sequentially by 300 and 50 basis points respectively.” We are confident of maintaining or improving our margins for full year, despite an “adverse impact” from wage hikes in September quarter, due to improved pricing and strong pipeline of orders, Mr Senapaty said.

He pointed out that pricing pressure was not felt due to better billing, execution of fixed price projects, mix of services offered to customers and improved realisation on fixed price projects.

The company, which added 31 new clients during the quarter, had a total staff strength of 95,675 as of June 30, 2008.
Mr Senapaty said “hiring would be in commensurate to the business Wipro wins and executes”.