After Infosys, Now Wipro Hires A Capgemini Top Executive As CEO & MD

With Wipro announcing to appoint Thierry Delaporte for its top post, two of the leading Bengaluru-headquartered companies will now have CEOs & MDs who were previously working with French IT services major Capgemini in leadership roles. Salil Parekh, who is presently the CEO & MD at Infosys was a member of the Group Executive Board ay Capgemini looking after the company’s UK, Asia Pacific and financial services business before joining the Bengaluru firm in January 2018.

Wipro on Friday announced that Delaporte who is Capgemini’s chief operating officer and also a member of the group executive board, would join the company as its CEO & MD, effective July 6, 2020. A French national, he would be based out of Paris. Wipro also said that since Neemuchwala would leave the company from June 1, its chairman Rishad Premji would oversee the daily operations of the firm during this interim period.

During his twenty-five year career with Capgemini, Delaporte held several leadership roles including that of chief executive officer of the global financial services strategic business unit, and head of all global service lines. His experience in overseeing Capgemini’s India operations- one of the largest delivery centres of the company- is likely to put him in good stead in managing the operations of Wipro. He has a bachelor’s degree in economy and finance from Sciences Po Paris and a Masters in Law from Sorbonne University.

“I am delighted to welcome Thierry as CEO and Managing Director of the company. Thierry has an exceptional leadership track record, strong international exposure, deep strategic expertise, a unique ability to forge long-standing client relationships, and proven experience of driving transformation and managing technological disruption. We believe that Thierry is the right person to lead Wipro in its next phase of growth,” said Rishad Premji, Chairman at Wipro Ltd. “I want to thank Abid for all that he has done for Wipro and for making this transition as smooth and seamless as possible despite his personal commitments.”

The appointment has come at a time when Wipro continues to lag its peers in driving top line growth in the past years.

In the past years, Wipro has taken many steps to realign its business operations for driving faster growth under the incumbent CEO like. While the West Asia business of the IT services firm has been restructured, Indian business has also been reorganised by carving out a separate unit for state-run public sector undertakings and government organisations from enterprise business. The IT services firm has also divested its low margin data centre business as part of its portfolio restructuring initiatives.

Despite all these measures, Wipro posted 1.7 per cent growth in its revenues from IT segment at $8.256 billion in the last financial year. So, the appointment is critical for the IT services firm to accelerate its revenue growth at a time when the industry is staring at a dip in demand owing to ongoing Covid-19 crisis.

Meanwhile, Wipro also announced the appointment of Deepak M Satwalekar, a financial services professional and former MD of HDFC Ltd, to its board of directors for five years effective July 1, 2020.