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Mr Girish Paranjpe

Vishwanath Kulkarni
Shamik Paul

Bangalore Oct. 29 Since selling its captive technology unit to Wipro Technologies last December, Citigroup has expanded its engagement with the Indian vendor by also offering business process outsourcing contracts.

“We have been able to extend the original engagement from only in IT space to BPO,” said Mr Girish Paranjpe, joint CEO, Wipro Technologies. “We are doing significant amount of work in BPO for Citi,” he added.

Details of the exact revenue contribution from Citi to Wipro was not available.

However, Citi is one of the top five clients of Wipro Technologies. The unnamed top client of Wipro accounted for 2.7 per cent of the company’s September quarter revenues.

Mr Paranjpe said the Citi Technology Services Ltd (CTSL), the erstwhile captive unit of Citigroup, has now been fully integrated with Wipro and was doing well. Wipro acquired the India-based CTSL for $127 million (Rs 615.8 crore) in an all cash deal last December.

As part of the deal, Wipro had signed a master services agreement for delivery of technology infrastructure services and application development maintenance services for six years, under which the banking giant would source services worth at least half a billion dollars from the Indian vendor.

Before the CTSL sell off, Citigroup had sold its BPO captive unit to TCS in October last in a $505-million deal as part of restructuring its operations by exiting non-core businesses.

Meanwhile, Wipro has seen an increase in receivables on extended collection terms to clients at Rs 532 crore for the September quarter from Rs 227 crore a year ago, as the company signed more total outsourcing contracts.

“In some of the large total outsourcing contracts, we offer extended collection terms relating to IT hardware, software and certain transformation services,” said Mr Suresh Senapaty, CFO, Wipro said.

The Corporate Treasury of Wipro provides internal financing to business units offering extended collection terms and such receivables are reflected in the capital employed.

“We will make it up in a five-year time frame as these contracts are structured on outcome based pricing,” Mr Senapaty added.

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