Wipro denies layoff rumours; adds 1,309 techies in Q1

Brushing away layoff rumours in the company, Wipro on Thursday reinforced its commitment to go ahead with its hiring game plan and localisation across the globe, while also taking ahead its automation and retraining agenda.

Commenting on hiring, Wipro CEO Abidali Z Neemuchwala said automation is going ahead with the Holmes platform, and local hiring across the US, Europe and the Middle East alongside India.

“We continue to hire. As you can notice, our net addition to headcount has again increased this quarter to 1,309 and has been continuously increasing. Wiproites have been offered redeployment opportunities that come in after the reskilling, which we are continuously doing,” he said.

The net addition of employees at Wipro comes at a time, when its peers in the industry, including TCS and Infosys have reduced headcount by 1,414 and 1,811, repectively.

He said the company is scaling the deployment of Wipro Holmes, which is an artificial intelligence platform, across clients.

“As automation programmes mature, it is increasingly easier to automate L1 tasks. We are going ahead with the internal goal on automating L2 and above tasks. I am happy to report that in Q1 we generated productivity of 2,100 people in the L2 and above bucket,” he said.

He said the company continues with its next-gen technologies, which then mature into hyper automation. “For the entire last year, we have redeployed 12,000 people. We put the people who are redeployed because of automation into retraining. Now, the senior people will be released and they will be retrained in more complex technologies,” he said.

The company CEO also said that there is a greater momentum for local hiring, reaching 50% in overseas geographies. “We have over 40 facilities across 23 states in the US. We have over 1,000 employees each in the states of Florida, California, Georgia and Texas, where we have established next-generation local delivery centres,” he said.

The CEO also said Wipro has a 1,60,000 employees, of which 75,000 people have been retrained, who are still working to qualify within the digital purview of the business. “About 20,000 to 22,000 people have actually migrated to the digital side of the business already,” he added.

Wipro HR head Saurabh Govil said the company is net positive on headcount. “Very clearly, there is no layoff in the company. And, any action taken in the first quarter is only routine action based on our annual assessment,” said Govil.

The company also affirmed that the utilisation has moved from 66% to 70% in the fourth quarter.