India’s Bill Gates. That’s what Forbes called him. But comparison is odious, and this one all the more so for being inappropriate as well. Apart from the fact that both the 54-year-old Azim Hasham Premji and the Microsoft czar made their billions in infotech and figure in Forbes’ latest list of global billionaires — Gates is the world’s richest and Premji, India’s richest — the two are poles apart.

Gates is a much hyped personality who is heartily disliked, even hated, by many of his compeers. Premji, in contrast, is known for his unassuming and extremely low-profile personality. Many maintain that his increasing wealth has only made him more of a recluse. Compared to the Ambanis of Reliance who have been ranked the fourth richest in India or the Tatas and Birlas, hardly anyone has heard of Premji outside business circles, although he heads Wipro, a well-established brand. The fact that he flies economy and avoids five-star hotels only reinforces this image of a reticent and media-shy person.

Thesharply contrasting styles of functioning of Microsoft and Wipro also speak volumes for the men behind them. While Microsoft is known for its aggressive market strategies, the most frequent charge levelled against Wipro is that it has failed to realise its own potential. Premji admitted as much on a couple of occasions when he said Wipro had underestimated its brand equity.

So consciously does the man avoid the limelight that getting information on him can put off the most intrepid journalist. Clearly, all that hype about being the richest man in India and the 177th in the world, had Premji ducking for cover last week. His secretary at the company’s headquarters in Bangalore kept fobbing off all requests for an interview with the words, “Mr Premji is at a meeting, please call later.” Calling later didn’t really help either.“Mr Premji hasn’t come in yet,” is what the secretary maintained with a straight face.

It was his father’s death in 1966 that forced Premji to cut short the engineering course hewas doing at Stanford and take over the running of the family concern dealing with vegetable oils, known as the Western India Vegetable Products. He was just two quarters away from graduation and he himself had barely crossed 20.

Premji’s success lay in literally reinventing the company he had inherited. The transformation of a cooking oil company into an information technology major happened in the ’80s. Premji had his first tryst with the information market when he started making minicomputers with technology licensed from Sentinel Computer Corp of USA. There was no looking back after that. Wipro soon become synonymous with information technology, and it accounted for more than 60 per cent of its revenue. The information technology operations grew, on an average, two and a half times faster than the company’s other businesses.

It is thanks to this that Wipro today has a market capitalisation of Rs 18,876 crore the fourth biggest by a private sector enterprise in the country. It was thanks to this thatPremji today, with 88.55 per cent of Wipro’s equity, is India’s richest man. With a fortune of 2.8 billion — or Rs 12,040 crore — Premji has forged ahead of NRI steel magnate Lakshmi Nivas Mittal, who was rated second richest.

Ironically, most of the key people behind the Wipro success, including Ashok Narasimhan, who founded Wipro Infotech, and group president Ashok Soota, who shaped Wipro’s destiny as the country’s third largest information technology major, did not come with any experience in the technology industry. And despite the heady highs scaled in software exports, Premji remains loyal to Wipro’s other businesses as well. Thus far, he has firmly resisted the well-meaning advice of investors and analysts, who have often suggested the company sell its consumer products, finance and medical equipment businesses and concentrate on its information technology operations.

Those who have watched the company grow, attribute its success to Premji’s close involvement in its running. Said one,“He getspersonally involved in the affairs of his company but his top management has complete freedom. He also interacts personally with staff and asks them to stay with his company.” Adds another business executive,“It’s this talent base he has built that will help him in the long run. Premji’s money may be family money but Wipro has a lot of young blood that will get the company far.” One of the biggest reasons why Wipro continues to attract talent is because it is perceived as an ethical organisation.

Ultimately, people say, it is Premji’s integrity and ethics that has seen Wipro through minor hiccups like its failed finance venture and inability to penetrate the domestic personal computer market. In fact, this impeccable integrity is the 54-year-old Premji’s biggest contribution to Wipro.

Although it is his company, no other member of the family is represented on Wipro’s 11-member board. For that matter, no member of the family figures on the company’s rolls and the chairman has made it clear that hissons, 22-year-old Rishad and 21-year-old Tariq, will have to earn their place in the company. Rishad is currently doing a financial management programme with General Electric Wipro has a joint venture with GE for the manufacture of medical systems after having graduated from the Connecticut-based Wesleyan University.

Premji has done a great job focusing on quality issues like Six Sigma, which earned the company 1 million in the first full year of implementation. His first task will now be to employ the same professionalism and courage to steer the company ahead of its closest rival, HCL. Incidentally, Shiv Nadar of the HCL group has been ranked by Forbes as the fourth richest Indian with a personal fortune of 1.2 billion.

To achieve this, Premji will have to capitalise on his ability to keep himself informed about the market which his colleague, Ashok Soota, feels is the key factor in the company’s growth profile. As Soota puts it, “Azim Premji’s biggest strengths are his management style and thefact that he has his finger on the pulse of customers and employees.”

–N. Shivapriya and Sheba Thayil