Wipro to take Australian headcount to 1,000

Wipro Ltd, a relatively late entrant in the lucrative information technology outsourcing market in Australia, is planning to hire more locals.

The company is trying to penetrate deeply into the market there. Wipro, India's third largest IT outsourcing provider, has about 90 Australians on its rolls now. It intends to increase the number of local employees to 250 by the end of the current financial year.

"Australia is a large market for us in the Asia Pacific region. We are quite bullish and investing heavily in that market. As a part of that strategy, we would like to enhance the capacity of our two development centres located the country and have about 250 Australian people by the end of this year, thus increasing the percentage of local people working there from the current 20 per cent to about 35 per cent of our workforce in Australia," said Rajat Mathur, senior VP and Chief Sales & Operations officer for Asia Pacific, Wipro Technologies.

Wipro currently has about 450 people in Australia, including 300 people at the two development centres in Melbourne and Adelaide. Besides, there are close to 350 employees at its various offshore locations in India, working for the company's Australian clients. With the increase in business opportunities there, the company expects the number of employees working for Australian customers to go up to about 1,000 people by the end of this financial year.

As part of its localisation strategy, Wipro has tied up with the local software industry body, Australian Computer Society. This will help the company to hire graduates from the top eight local universities, Mathur added.

The IT services market in Australia and New Zealand is about $14 billion and is growing. This has prompted all Indian IT outsourcing providers to increase their focus on the ANZ market. Infosys, with a subsidiary in Australia, with its acquisition of Expert Information Services, employs close to 400 people there.

Wipro entered the Australian market seven to eight years earlier. It derives close to 15 per cent of its global revenues from the Asia Pacific region (which includes Japan and India). Though the company does not give country-wise breakdown of revenue, it said those from Australia and New Zealand had shown a compounded annual growth rate of 100 per cent during the past five years, 'making it the highest growth market in the region'.

As part of its strategy, Wipro has been focusing on specific sectors - banking and insurance, energy and utilities, telecom, retail and government in Australia.