Azim Premji took a cooking-oil firm into software, then gave most of it away
In 1966 a 21-year-old Stanford engineering student flew home to India after his father died and took over a small company making cooking oil and laundry soap. Azim Premji turned it into Wipro, a technology giant. He later handed stock worth 21 billion dollars to a foundation for schools.
Premji was born in Bombay on 24 July 1945 into a Gujarati Khoja Muslim family. His father, Muhammed Hashim Premji, was nicknamed the Rice King of Burma and declined an invitation from Muhammad Ali Jinnah to move to Pakistan, choosing to stay in India. The year Azim was born, his father set up Western Indian Vegetable Products in Amalner, Maharashtra, selling Sunflower Vanaspati oil and a soap called 787 made from leftovers of oil production.
The son widened the product range into bakery fats, toiletries, baby products, lighting and hydraulic cylinders. The big turn came in the 1980s. With IBM gone from India, he renamed the firm Wipro and started building minicomputers with the American company Sentinel Computer Corporation, then steered it from soap toward software. Business Week later counted him among the greatest entrepreneurs, and in 2006 he created a family investment office, PremjiInvest.
Giving became the second career. He founded the Azim Premji Foundation in 2001 to improve public schools in poor regions. In December 2010 he pledged 2 billion dollars by moving 8.7% of Wipro into a trust, followed by further transfers of 12% in 2013 and 18% in 2015. In 2013 he became the first Indian to sign the Giving Pledge, and a further 34% of his Wipro stock in March 2019 lifted his total endowment to 21 billion dollars.
India awarded him the Padma Vibhushan in 2011, and France made him a knight of the Legion of Honour in 2018. His son Rishad now chairs Wipro.
Source: Azim Premji
