Wipro's consumer care and lighting business will expand its range of products to detergents, energy drinks and fabric conditioners, intensifying competition in sectors dominated by global giants Hindustan Unilever and Procter & Gamble.

"The focus will be on cross leveraging of assets. With backend integration, we will enter newer categories under existing brands, with existing formulations, manufacturing and supply," Wipro Consumer chief executive Vineet Agrawal said.

NEW DELHI: India’s technology bellwether WiproBSE 0.07 % is seeking to reposition itself as a conglomerate, crafting a holistic brand identity to give businesses as diverse as consumer care and lighting the prominence they deserve, according to a person aware of the development.

“The objective of the exercise is to rebrand Wipro as a group that is not just focused on IT, but also on consumer goods, lighting and other businesses. This is to do with the backlash in the US over Indian IT firms,” the person told ET. The exercise is likely to involve rebranding the positioning, tagline and logo, the person said, requesting not to be named given the sensitivity of the subject.

Bengaluru: Indian technology outsourcing companies’ inability to find new customers even as US rival Accenture Plc is managing to do business with firms that dominate the consumer Internet, including Google, Facebook Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., again underlines the reason behind the dismal growth of home-grown companies.

Google, Facebook, Amazon, Uber and Airbnb together accounted for at least $1 billion of Accenture’s $32.9 billion in revenue for the year ended August 2016 (Accenture follows a September-August fiscal), said an executive familiar with the development who declined to be named.

Wipro Chief Azim Premji today said the implementation of smart city project in India unfortunately has been shallow, despite catching a lot of attention from Prime Minister Narendra Modi. “It is very unfortunate that the smart city project has caught a lot of attention from Prime Minister etc, but its implementation has been shallow,” Premiji said in an interaction with the students at the celebrations of Wipro’s 2016 earthian awards here.

The smart city mission is one of the flagship programmes of NDA government, which was announced on June 25, 2015.

Stocks of largecap information technology (IT) companies such as TCS, Infosys and Wipro tanked up to 5% in intraday trade on reports that a legislation has been introduced in the US House of Representatives, which among other things, calls for more than doubling the minimum salary of H-1B visa holders to $130,000.

The move, experts say, will make it difficult for the software services firms to replace American employees with foreign workers, including from India.

Indian IT giant Wipro has said that Vice Chairman T K Kurien will retire at the end of January, bringing an end to his 16-year long career with the company.

Kurien had served as the chief executive of Wipro for five years before being replaced by Abidali Z Neemuchwala in March last year. He leaves the company two months ahead of the end of his planned tenure.

Wipro has taken an interesting approach towards digital through Wipro Digital, a unit that is branded separately and focuses entirely on business outcomes using strategy, design and technology as the enablers. Acquisition of Designit has been a shot in the arm. We maintain our reduce stance on Wipro noting multiple business headwinds but would keep a close eye on its aggressive and interesting approach to play catch-up in digital.

Software major Wipro has agreed to pay a civil money penalty worth $5 million to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to resolve a six-year-old investigation on account of embezzlement of funds by an employee.

In a filing to the BSE, the company said while agreeing to a settlement it neither admits nor denies the allegations made by SEC that Wipro violated certain provisions of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.

Wipro chief executive Abidali Neemuchwala has split the information technology (IT) major's India and Middle East (West Asia) business in two. And, carved a separate hyper automation group by consolidating the Artificial Intelligence (AI) assets such as Holmes that would be headed by its chief technology officer, K R Sanjiv.

The backdrop is the government push for a 'Digital India' and the move towards a less-cash society. So, the company's India region would now be an independent entity with its head reporting directly to Neemuchwala. He has appointed Sreenath A V, currently head of Wipro's global Oracle Practice, to head the India region.

Information technology major Wipro has said it will work with select start-ups in India that are associated with Microsoft Accelerator to help them scale their business and take them to customers globally.

Wipro will also look at start-ups to identify innovative solutions and products they can build in its offerings and help generate value for its customers.

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