Azim Premji on Diversification

His father had incorporated Western Indian Vegetable Products Ltd in 1945 at Amalner, in Maharashtra's Jalgaon district, manufacturing Sunflower Vanaspati cooking oil and a laundry soap called 787 that was a byproduct of the oil trade. That single-product, small-town family company would, over five decades, become the global IT services firm Wipro.

In the 1980s, after IBM was expelled from India, Premji changed the company name to Wipro and entered high technology by manufacturing minicomputers through a technology tie-up with the American Sentinel Computer Corporation. From there he made a deliberate pivot from soaps to software, eventually turning Wipro into one of India's flagship IT services exporters.

Under Premji, the original hydrogenated cooking-oil business was progressively diversified into bakery fats, ethnic ingredient-based toiletries, hair-care soaps, baby toiletries, lighting products and hydraulic cylinders — a portfolio reshaping exercise that anticipated and funded the eventual IT pivot rather than replacing it overnight.

Premji was introduced as the leader who transformed Wipro from a family-run vegetable oil business (Western India Vegetable Products Ltd) into one of the world's largest outsourcing companies over a roughly forty-year arc. The shorthand used in the West — from Crisco to computers — captured the sheer scale of the diversification in a single phrase.

He positioned Wipro's gradual evolution as a sequence of pivots rather than one grand one. The 1970s exit of IBM from India opened room for local computer manufacturing; Wipro began assembling its own machines, then moved into computer and IT services for global firms operating in India, and as computers commoditised, shifted toward servers and R&D labs for hire to Western tech and consumer firms.