Azim Hashim Premji

Honored with Padma Bhushan award by the Government of India, listed twice among 100 most influential people by TIME Magazine, recipient of Economic Times Lifetime Achievement Award, and the first Indian to receive the Faradey Medal..the list is endless. Azim Hashim Premji is a proud Indian business tycoon, investor and philanthropist, who is the chairman of Wipro Limited, informally known as the Czar of the Indian IT Industry. He is the force behind guiding Wipro through four decades of diversification and growth to finally emerge as one of the global leaders in the Software Industry

Azim Premji was born in Mumbai in a Muslim family with origins from Kutch in Gujarat. His father - Muhammed Hashim Premji who was a noted businessman and was known as Rice King of Burma, incorporated Western Indian Vegetable Products Ltd, based at Amalner, a small town in the Jalgaon district of Maharashtra.

In 1966, on the news of his father's death, the then 21-year-old Azim Premji returned home from Stanford University, where he was studying engineering, to take charge of Wipro. He became the chairman of Wipro at the young age of 21 amidst shareholder revoltThe company, which was called Western Indian Vegetable Products at the time, dealt in hydrogenated oil manufacturing. But Azim Premji deep insight and vision diversified the company to bakery fats, ethnic ingredient based toiletries, hair care soaps, baby toiletries, lighting products, and hydraulic cylinders.

In the 1980s, the young entrepreneur, recognising the importance of the emerging IT field, took advantage of the vacuum left behind by the expulsion of IBM from India, changed the company name to Wipro and entered the high-technology sector by manufacturing minicomputers under technological collaboration with US based Sentinel Computer Corporation. Thereafter, Premji made a focused shift from just soaps & shampoos to software.

The 80's saw a series of ventures by Azim Premji and Wipro. His obsession with excellence has transformed Wipro under his leadership from a US $2mn cooking fat company into a conglomerate spanning multiple businesses that is generating revenue of US $7bn. Premji is indeed one of the pioneers in developing the IT sector in India and putting the sector on the global stage.

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Azim Hashim Premji

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