Wipro plans 3rd delivery centre in China

Global IT giant, Wipro Technologies, will open a third delivery centre in China to cater to the growing needs of its multinational clients.

"We have aggressive plans for China," chief executive Japan & China operations and president Wipro Japan, Hiroshi N Alley told PTI in Tokyo.

Alley, who has just joined Wipro in Tokyo to head China and Japan operations of the company, said Wipro already has operations in China's Shanghai and Beijing.

"We are expanding our global footprints. We now have delivery centre in Shanghai and Beijing and once we scale up to about 400 to 500 people we are evaluating the third center and are in the process of finalising it," he said.

The Wipro delivery centre has 250 employees in Shanghai and 50 in Beijing.

Wipro, a late entrant to China, compared to other three top Indian IT giants, TCS, Infosys and Satyam, is currently looking at eastern Chinese cities like Nanjing and Chengdu in southwest China as major Chinese cities are vying with each other to offer the best business terms to Indian software companies.

"We want to be close to our clients and many of them have major operations in China," Alley said, emphasising that Wipro wanted to serve the multinational clients from both India as well as China.

"This does not mean that we are taking away jobs from India to China," he said.

The company has been operating in Japan since 1995.

"During our decade-long relationship with Japanese customers, we have understood the need for having Japanese language and cultural skills in our Engineers as a key differentiator. As a result, Wipro has the biggest presence in Japan, among all the Indian IT Services Company, a Wipro spokesman said.

"Our strategy is to build long term relationship with the customers and to help them gain from our breadth of service offerings," he said.

He pointed out that Wipro has two entities, Japan Development Centre in Yokohoma and Japan Strategic Business Unit in Chennai, which is providing all support to various Business Units in Wipro for their Japanese requirements.

The JSBU provides resource support, language support and project execution / delivery support to various Japanese projects executed from India. JDC is a near-shore development centre, employing native Japanese Engineers who provide onsite support to projects executed in Japan.

JDC and JSBU have the mandate to grow Japanese skills across Wipro and keep the Japan focus among the various business units. Apart from JDC and JSBU, there is also an exclusive marketing team for Japan. It is made up of mostly native Japanese Business Managers, Alley said.

He said Wipro has penetrated into the Japanese domestic market and was doing well.

The JSBU also runs a well-acclaimed 'Shimpo programme' to impart Japanese language and cultural skills among engineers in India.