Azim Premji

He is married to Yasmeen, and has two children: Rishad and Tariq. Rishad is currently the Chief Strategy Officer of IT Business, Wipro.

Azim Premji was born on July 24, 1945, in Bombay (now Mumbai), India, into a Nizari Ismaili Shia Muslim family. His father Mohamed Hashem Premji was a prominent businessman who founded the Western Indian Vegetable Products Ltd., a company dealing in vegetable products and refined oils. One of its most famous products was “Vanaspati”, a hydrogenated shortening.

In 1947 British India was partitioned into India and Pakistan, and Jinnah invited the senior Premji to come to Pakistan. However the family, in spite of being a Muslim one, chose to stay back in India.

After completing his schooling, Azim Premji went to the US to study engineering from Stanford University. However, his father died unexpectedly shortly before his graduation in 1966 and he had to return home to take control of the business. He would officially complete his Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering years later.

Azim Premji took control of his father’s business in 1966 when he was just 21 years old. At that time the company primarily dealt in hydrogenated oil manufacturing. Soon after assuming control, Premji began to look for diversification opportunities and strove to expand the business beyond refined oils.

Soon the company diversified to include bakery fats, toiletries, light bulbs, hair care products, and hydraulic cylinders in its portfolio. Since the company no longer dealt with just vegetable products, Premji renamed it “Wipro” in 1977.

In 1979, the Indian government expelled the computer firm IBM from the country. Premji saw this as a great opportunity for tapping into the emerging computer hardware and software market and began moving Wipro into the computer business.

Over the 1980s the company collaborated with several other businesses in the computer field, including an American company Sentinel Computer Corporation, to form partnerships and positioned Wipro as a successful manufacturer of computer hardware. Eventually the company entered the software market too.

Driven by the quest to achieve the highest standards of quality, Premji ensured that his company hired the best brains in software engineering and provided them with world-class training to further hone their skills. This helped Wipro to develop high-quality software at considerably lower costs as compared to American companies, enabling Wipro to successfully export custom software to the US.

Azim Premji inherited Western Indian Vegetable Products Ltd, a company producing hydrogenated cooking oil, and transformed it into Wipro, an IT Consulting and System Integration services company which is today one of the largest IT Services firm in the World. The company has its presence in 67 countries and has a market capitalization of approximately $ 35 billion as on March 2015.