Expat exits: Why foreign-born CEOs don’t last the distance in Indian IT firms
Thierry Delaporte’s exit as Wipro’s top boss comes a year after Brian Humphries, another expat CEO, was removed by the Cognizant board. There are issues, beyond managing profit and loss, that expats have found challenging in India. Culture, for instance.
Mint explains: Average revenue growth in the last 10 years was in single digits. It added $2.5 billion during that time in an otherwise high growth period for Indian IT. Post covid, the growth accelerated due to digitization and automation.
This period also saw Wipro slip in the IT services pecking order with rival HCL Tech overtaking it to emerge in the top three service providers, along with TCS and Infosys. Its operating margins were also under pressure. In 2023 alone, Wipro saw more than 10 key leaders exit, including the CFO, Jatin Dalal, who joined rival Cognizant.
Retaining talent was becoming a challenge. Delaporte started off on a great note in 2020 with a $700 million deal with Metro AG, but could not sustain the momentum. In March 2021, Wipro’s most expensive buyout, the $1.5 billion Capco deal, turned out to be a huge culture mismatch between Capco’s western style consulting to Wipro’s India-based delivery model.
Capco, a London-based BFSI focused consultancy, was meant to bolster Wipro’s BFSI consulting but had only a marginal impact on the Bengaluru’s-based services provider’s revenue. Delaporte’s big bet could not stem Wipro’s slide. And it has mostly struggled in its turnaround efforts.
Only a few IT services firms have tried it. Vishal Sikka, the first non-founder CEO at Infosys, was based in US with: and was from non-IT services area. Brian Humphries, an American who worked at IT hardware and telecom companies (HP, Dell and Vodafone) was CEO of
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