Nomura India said Thierry Delaporte's resignation as Wipro CEO and its timing was sudden, surprising and came before the end of his five-year tenure in June 2025. The domestic brokerage said investors would be keenly following the new CEO Srinivas Pallia’s strategy, which is unlikely to be revealed on April 19 alongside the IT firm’s conference call. For FY25, the foreign broking firm expects Wipro to lag IT peers in terms of revenue growth.
Srinivas Pallia will be Wipro’s new CEO with effect from April 7 for a tenure of five years. Srinivas has been with Wipro since 1992 and has held numerous leadership roles, including President of Wipro’s Consumer Business Unit and Global Head of Business Application Services. Most recently, he served as the CEO for Americas 1, Wipro’s largest and fastest-growing market, where he led a wide range of industry sectors. Srini will be based out of New Jersey, US and would be the first insider CEO for Wipro since 2016.
All eyes on Srinivas
"While being an insider, Srinivas would have a head start compared to an external candidate who may have joined Wipro as a CEO, the task for him remains clear and the same — to bring back lost revenue growth momentum for the company. Wipro’s tepid revenue performance has made it a laggard in FY23-24 compared to most of it large-cap Indian peers. Senior leadership attrition has been high over the past two years and needs to be stemmed urgently, in our view," Nomura India said.
Strategy change under new CEO?
Nomura India said investors will play a close attention to the new CEO’s strategy, which may come in next 1-2 quarters. It feels that it is unlikely to be revealed during the upcoming March quarter results conference call on April 19.
The outgoing CEO, Thierry, had experimented with multiple things. They included 1) large-scale consulting M&A (Capco and Rizing, simplifying the organisational structure by replacing various strategic business units, service lines and geographies with four strategic market units (SMUs) and two global business lines. He also focused on large deals by creating a centralised team; and hired local senior level talent.
"It is unclear to us if Srini will be making significant changes to this strategy to revive growth momentum. Recent C-level changes are all internal replacements We think the two key C-level roles (CEO and CFO) both have been replaced with internal candidates to signal confidence in the depth of senior leadership talent available at Wipro and to address the significant churn seen over the past two years," Nomura India said.
It noted that Aparna Iyer was appointed as the CFO in Nov 2023.
That said, the brokerage believes the revenue growth recovery for Wipro is going to be slow and unlikely to change significantly due to the CEO change in the near term.
"We would keep a close eye on his strategy in the coming quarters. We expect Wipro to lag its peer set growth rate in FY25F and reiterate our Reduce rating with an unchanged target price of Rs 410 set at 17 times FY26F EPS," Nomura India said. Thierry will be with Wipro until 31 May to ensure a smooth transition to the incoming CEO.