By Sai Ishwarbharath B and Haripriya Suresh
BENGALURU (Reuters) – Indian IT services firm Wipro has promoted six employees to senior vice president roles and 25 others to vice president roles, two internal memos seen by Reuters showed.
The promotions, seen by industry watchers as a move to stem senior-level attrition, came after a series of high-profile exits at the country’s No.4 software services exporter.
Many senior executives have left Wipro in the past year, including finance chief Jatin Dalal, Chief Growth Officer Stephanie Trautman, and Digital and Cloud head Barath Narayanan.
“Vertical movement as a means to retain (talent) and control attrition (has) worked well for most enterprises,” staffing firm Xpheno executive Sundar Eshwar said, referring to the recent rise in such appointments in the roughly $254 billion sector.
Attrition across AVP, VP and SVP roles in India’s IT and consulting companies was 11% in fiscal 2024, down 4 percentage points from the previous fiscal, data from Xpheno shows.
Wipro confirmed the move on Friday and said it was part of its “ongoing commitment to developing strong internal leaders”.
However, the firm has promoted fewer senior employees in the current fiscal, a move that analysts said reflected its lacklustre performance.
Wipro, led by CEO Thierry Delaporte, is also likely to be the only one among India’s top four IT firms to end the fiscal year with a decline in revenue.
In its previous promotion cycle in January 2023, it elevated a record 73 employees – 12 to SVP and 61 to VP roles.
“As the demand shifts for more specialized talent, the slower number of promotions could help them with capacity to hire for later in 2024 to 2025,” said Ray Wang, principal analyst and founder of Constellation Research.
Among the ones promoted to SVP roles are Wipro’s Chief Delivery Officer Ajit Mahale, healthcare portfolio leader Anuj Kumar, Capco CFO Benjamin Simon, Canada country head Kim Watson, Europe cloud sales head Srinivasaa HG, and the head of its cloud arm’s strategy and execution arm Satish Y.
(Reporting by Haripriya Suresh and Sai Ishwarbharath B; Editing by Dhanya Skariachan and Varun H K)
