India's Wipro Q2 profit misses estimate

BENGALURU : India's Wipro Ltd on Wednesday reported a weaker-than-expected second quarter profit, hit by higher employee-related expenses.

The Bengaluru-based company also forecast its revenue from IT services business to be in the range of $2.81 billion to $2.85 billion for the quarter ending Dec. 31, translating to a sequential growth of 0.5 per cent to 2.0 per cent.

Wipro said its total quarterly expenses jumped 19.5 per cent to 196.22 billion Indian rupees, while staff attrition in the IT services business fell to 23 per cent, from 23.3 per cent at the end of June.

Earlier this week, its largest rival Tata Consultancy Services Ltd posted a bigger-than-expected rise in quarterly profit, but flagged that clients were taking longer to decide on bigger outsourcing deals in an uncertain global economic environment.

Wipro's consolidated net profit for quarter-ended Sept. 30 came in at 26.59 billion Indian rupees ($323.3 million), compared with 29.31 billion rupees year ago.

Analysts on average had expected a profit of 28.44 billion rupees, according to Refinitiv data.

Revenue from operations rose nearly 15 per cent to 225.40 billion rupees.

($1 = 82.2530 Indian rupees)

(The story has been corrected to fix the company's expenses figures and period for attrition numbers in paragraph 3.)