Azim Premji

Azim Hashim Premji took over a small vegetable-oil company at twenty-one, spent the next fifty-three years turning it into one of the world’s best-known software firms, and then gave most of what he owned to the education of children he will never meet.

A Factory in Amalner

His father, Muhammad Hashim Premji, was a prosperous rice trader. In December 1945 he set up Western India Vegetable Products Limited in Amalner, a small town in Maharashtra. It made cooking fat, sold as Sunflower Vanaspati, and laundry soap.

Azim Premji was born on 24 July 1945 in Bombay, a few months before the company was founded. His mother was Gulbanoo Premji.

At partition in 1947 the family, who were Muslim, stayed in India. Family accounts say that Muhammad Ali Jinnah invited Hashim Premji to move to Pakistan, and that he declined.

Called Home From Stanford

Azim Premji went to Stanford University in California to study electrical engineering. In 1966, while he was there, his father died suddenly.

He came home to run the company. He was twenty-one, had no experience of business, and was taking over a factory that made cooking oil. He has recalled that at an early shareholders’ meeting, one investor told him openly that he should sell his stake to someone more capable.

He did not. He finished his Stanford degree decades later, by distance learning.

From Oil to Wipro

Through the late 1960s and 1970s he widened the business. He kept the edible oils and added soaps, toiletries and lighting. In 1975 he set up a business making hydraulic cylinders, which became Wipro Fluid Power. The company changed its name to Wipro, a shortening of its original name. Santoor soap, launched in the 1980s, became one of the best-selling soaps in India.

He also set out the rules the company would run on. Wipro became known, in an economy where small payments to officials were routine, for refusing to pay bribes. Premji has described that rule in speeches as non-negotiable, even when it meant waiting months longer for a licence, a connection or an approval than a competitor who paid. Integrity was written into the company’s published values, and he treated breaches of it as the one offence that ended a career at Wipro.

None of this looked like the start of a technology company. It looked like a careful, frugal manufacturer spreading its risk across several dull businesses. That was, in many ways, exactly what it was.

When IBM Left

The turn came from government policy. In 1977 India tightened its rules on foreign ownership, and IBM decided to leave the country rather than reduce its stake in its Indian business.

That left a gap in the market for computers. Wipro entered it, building minicomputers in India under licence from an American company. It went on to make personal computers and set up a joint venture with General Electric to make medical equipment.

More important than the machines was what grew up around them. Wipro built a large team of engineers to install, maintain and program its computers, and in the 1990s it began selling that expertise to foreign companies. When India opened its economy in 1991, and foreign firms began looking for cheaper programmers, Wipro was ready.

The Software Company

Through the 1990s, software services grew into the core of the company. Wipro wrote and maintained software for banks, telecom companies and manufacturers around the world. It did well from the rush to fix the Y2K bug at the end of the decade. In October 2000 Wipro listed its shares on the New York Stock Exchange.

He was also willing to hand the running of the business to others. In 1999 he brought in Vivek Paul, who had run the company’s medical-systems joint venture with GE, to lead the technology business, and Wipro grew quickly under a series of professional chief executives. Premji stayed as chairman, set the direction and the values, and let managers manage — an arrangement still unusual in Indian family-controlled companies at the time.

The rise of Wipro’s share price made Premji, for several years around 2000, the richest person in India. He kept his habits. Accounts of his frugality are widely reported and consistent: flying economy class, driving an ordinary family car, staying in company guest houses and turning off lights in empty offices.

The Business That Kept the Soap

The software company is the Wipro most people know, but the old businesses never went away. The consumer products arm kept growing, both in India and abroad. It bought the Singapore-based personal-care company Unza in 2007 and Yardley’s business outside Europe in 2009, and built Santoor into one of the largest soap brands in the country.

In 2013 Wipro separated its non-IT businesses — consumer care, lighting and engineering — into a new, unlisted company, Wipro Enterprises, which the Premji family controls. The listed Wipro became a pure technology company. The original cooking-fat business from Amalner had, in effect, become two large companies.

Giving It Away

In 2001 he set up the Azim Premji Foundation. Rather than build its own schools, it chose to work with state governments to improve India’s public school system: training teachers, developing curricula and running programmes in some of the poorest districts in the country.

He funded it on a scale unusual anywhere. In December 2010 he transferred Wipro shares worth about $2 billion to a trust for the foundation. In 2013 he became the first Indian to sign the Giving Pledge, the promise started by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to give away most of one’s wealth. In March 2019 he announced a further transfer that brought his total endowment to about $21 billion — roughly 67 per cent of the economic ownership of Wipro.

In 2010 the foundation opened Azim Premji University in Bengaluru, which trains teachers and development workers.

The foundation’s approach has been deliberately unglamorous. It places its own staff in district offices to work alongside government teachers, often for years, rather than running showpiece schools of its own. Premji has argued that India’s children will be educated in public schools or not at all, and that private charity should make those schools better rather than compete with them. In recent years the foundation has also funded health work and, in Karnataka, a large programme to add eggs to the midday meals served in government schools.

The money is managed so that it lasts. The endowment’s investments are handled by PremjiInvest, a professional investment office, and the returns fund the foundation’s work year after year. The aim, as he has described it, is an institution that will outlive him and keep working on the same problem for generations.

When the Covid-19 pandemic reached India in 2020, the foundation, Wipro and Wipro Enterprises together committed ₹1,125 crore to relief and health work.

In the year to March 2020 he gave more than ₹7,900 crore, topping the list of India’s most generous donors compiled by Hurun and EdelGive — more than ₹20 crore a day.

Stepping Back

He retired as executive chairman of Wipro on 30 July 2019, after fifty-three years. His elder son, Rishad Premji, succeeded him. Azim Premji stayed on the board for some years as founder chairman.

He is married to Yasmeen Premji, and they have two sons, Rishad and Tariq. India awarded him the Padma Bhushan in 2005 and the Padma Vibhushan in 2011, and France made him a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur in 2013.

The measure of him is not how rich he became, but how little of it he kept. He built one of India’s great companies out of a factory that made cooking fat, and then put most of its value into the country’s government schools.

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