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Meet the man who turned a cooking oil into a 300,000 CR IT company. 1. In 1966, Azim Premji suddenly came to India because of his father's untimely death. At 21, Azim had to run his hydrogenated cooking oil business - Western Indian Vegetable Products, known for Dalda Ghee and Sunflower Oil, but he had a different plan. 🤔 2. He diversified the business to bakery fats, soaps, baby toiletries, lighting products, and hydraulic cylinders. But then the 1977 Morarji Desai-led government announced a change in FDI rules, and the IT giant IBM left India. Premji had an idea again. 💡 3. He wanted to enter the IT sector by manufacturing minicomputers. Premji changed the name of Western Indian Products to its short form, hired an infotech team and floated a new company. In 1980, Wipro Products Limited was born. 🚀 4. After getting the license for minicomputers, Wipro collaborated with US-based Sentinel Computer. 1981 - Wipro developed the first Indian minicomputer, Wipro Series 86, on the Intel 8086 chip in an IISc lab. By 1984, it achieved 100 installations. 📉 5. In 1987, Wipro also launched the Wipro 386 minicomputer based on the Intel 80386 microprocessor and UNIX System V. It became only the second company in the World to integrate UNIX with Intel microprocessor-based computers. But something was changing. 👇 6. Joint ventures between Indian computer companies and MNCs grew from 11 in 1985 to 35 in 1988. Azim knew it was difficult to survive on hardware alone and had to move to software. In 1990, Wipro became the first Indian company to set up offshore R&D centres for IT development. 🙌 7. With clients like Sun Microsystems, Intel, and General Electric, Wipro became the second-largest Indian software exporter in 1998. Even the 2000 Dotcom crash could not stop it as it was listed on the NASDAQ in October 2000 and had as much as three times the market capitalisation of its rival, Infosys. 💪 8. As Wipro became India's most valuable company worth 2,00,000 crore, it joined the billion-dollar revenue club with a 5,881 CR revenue in 2004 at a profit of 1032 CR. 16% came from domestic and APAC and 10% from Consumer business and 74% came from Global IT & Services. Wipro became a global name. 🌎 9. But Azim did not stop innovating and launched India's fastest supercomputer, SAGA-220, with ISRO in 2011. As it demerged its non-IT business in 2012, it focused on IT with a string of global acquisitions - Promax Applications (2012), Designit (2015) and Appirio (2016). By 2017, Wipro had clocked 55417.9 CR as revenue. 💰 10. Today, Wipro is present in 65 countries and has over 230,000 employees. It clocked revenues of 89,760 CR at a profit of 11,112 CR last year. It is the World's 7th largest IT services company, valued at 300,610 CR. 💪 ➡️ Azim Premji was India's richest and the World's fifth richest, worth 150,000 CR for five years before he donated 50% of his wealth to charity. He is a man beyond money! 🙏