Thursday, December 05, 2013: If reports are to be believed, Wipro is cutting down the production capacity at its PC manufacturing and assembly factories situated in Uttarakhand and Puducherry. People close to the matter told ET that the company is also moving some of its employees from manufacturing division to other roles. “The management has not conveyed specific announcement on manufacturing business, but the factory is at a standstill and fresh production is stopped,” one of them said.
If this is actually happening, then it will affect hundreds of employees, some of whom are contract staff. This news follows the announcement of HCL Infosystems’ that it will be moving away from PC manufacturing.
It was in 1982 that Wipro entered the hardware business and then it later forayed into IT services, ,making it India’s third-ranked technology services company. The hardware division of the company has witnessed drop in profits in the hardware division that manufactures laptops, desktops and servers, over the past several quarters.
A local government official in Kotdwar told ET, “There has been a slowdown in the factory production and the company (Wipro) seems to be scaling down this facility.” The company responded to an email request from ET stating that it was discontinuing production of Wipro-branded desktops, laptops and servers after “evaluating the changing market scenario and customer needs.”
“Manufacturing our own PCs was not giving us a competitive differentiation in our System Integration solution offering,” said Soumitro Ghosh, senior vice-president and head of Wipro Infotech, wrote in the statement.
Sources informed that Wipro may still invest in hardware and procure from other device makers rather than manufacturing.
