Wipro Limited history

In 1966, just before Premji was to complete his degree in engineering at Stanford University, his father died unexpectedly.

1968: Founder's son, Azim Hasham Premji assumes leadership of company.

By 1971 business nearly doubled from when Azim Premji took over.

The company's first departure from its main cooking oil business came about in 1975.

But in 1977 the Indian government decided to throw out United States computer giant IBM over a dispute about investment and intellectual property, creating what Premji saw as a golden business opportunity.

And under the direction of P.S. Pai, Wipro's consumer care division expanded beyond oil in 1979, establishing operations in soaps, toiletries, and baby care products.

In 1980 Wipro launched information technology services for the domestic market, setting up in Bangalore a crack-team of R&D and marketing managers, headed by Ashok Narasimhan.

Ventured into the fledgling IT industry in 1981

Established software products and exports subsidiary, Wipro Systems Ltd. in 1983

1985: Wipro begins to manufacture toilet soaps, PCs, and dot-matrix printers.

Established a Joint venture with GE in 1989

1992: Lighting business is established.

Wipro discarded its PC brand in 1995 when it formed a joint venture with Acer, a Taiwan-based computer and peripherals manufacturer and distributor.

And even its Six Sigma quality initiative, which aimed to reduce the defect rate to virtually nothing, already led to an eightfold gain over the investments in its first 20 months, which began in 1997.

Wipro GE emerged as the largest healthcare systems company in South Asia in 1998, and in that same year, became the top exporter of such systems in India.

In 1999 Premji officially completed his degree from Stanford through a distance-learning arrangement.

Instead of doing small portions of large IT software solutions, Wipro would set out to develop comprehensive, end-to-end solutions, which included both software services and hardware, and often involved outsourcing the simpler code work to other countries. For example, in August of 2000, Wipro launched a "Portal-in-a-Box," which was a fixed-price, end-to-end solution to help businesses create a sales presence on the Web.