Azim Hashim Premji, an Indian businessman and philanthropist who served as chairman of Wipro Limited, was born on July 24, 1945. Premji is still the founding chairman and a non-executive member of the board. He is referred to colloquially as the Czar of the Indian IT Sector. He was in charge of leading Wipro through four decades of expansion and diversification so that it could eventually become one of the world leaders in the software sector. He was named one of Asiaweek's top 20 most powerful men in the globe in 2010. Time magazine has included him on its list of the 100 most important people, once in 2004 and more recently in 2011. He has long been named as one of The 500 Most Influential Muslims.
He is also the Chancellor of Bangalore's Azim Premji University. The Government of India presented Premji with the Padma Vibhushan, the second-highest civilian honour in India.
Premji's net worth is projected to be $9.3 billion and $25 billion, respectively, as of February 2023 by the Forbes and Bloomberg Billionaires Index. By signing the Giving Pledge in 2013, he committed to giving away at least half of his wealth. Premji began by giving the $2.2 billion Azim Premji Foundation, which supports education in India. He came in first place on the 2020 EdelGive Hurun India Philanthropy List. After giving away a significant sum of money to charity in 2019, he fell from the second position on the Forbes India Rich list to the seventeenth position.
Early Life Career And Education
Premji was born in Bombay, India, to a Gujarati Khoja Ismaili Muslim and Shia family. His father, the Rice King of Burma, was a well-known merchant. The founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, sent an invitation to his father, Muhammad Hashim Premji, to visit Pakistan; however, he declined and opted to stay in India. Premji graduated from Stanford University with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering. Yasmeen Premji is his wife. Rishad and Tariq, the couple's two children, were born. Currently, Wipro's IT division's chief strategy officer is Rishad Premji.
Muhammed Hashim Premji established Western Indian Vegetable Products Ltd in 1945. The company is headquartered in Amalner, a tiny village in Maharashtra's Jalgaon district. It used to produce laundry soap with the brand name 787 as well as frying oil under the Sunflower Vanaspati label as a byproduct. After learning of his father's passing in 1966, Azim Premji, who was 21 at the time and attending Stanford University to study engineering, went home to take over Wipro. Western Indian Vegetable Products, as the business was then known, manufactured hydrogenated oils. However, Azim Premji later expanded the company's product line to include baking fats, ethnic ingredient-based toiletries, hair care soaps, baby toiletries, lighting products and hydraulic cylinders.
Recognising the significance of the developing IT industry in the 1980s, the young businessman capitalised on the void left by IBM's departure from India, changed the company's name to Wipro, and entered the high-technology sector by producing minicomputers in technical cooperation with an American company, Sentinel Computer Corporation. Premji then concentrated on moving away from soaps and into software.
Foundation By Azim Premji
He promised to donate $2 billion to India's school system in December 2010. To accomplish this, 213 million equity shares of Wipro Ltd. owned by a couple of his controlled corporations were transferred to the Azim Premji Trust. The largest donation of its sort has ever been made to India. Premji promised an extra 34% of his Wipro stock to the foundation in March 2019. With this distribution, his endowment to the foundation will equal US$21 billion, at a current value of almost US$7.5 billion.
The National Centre for Biological Sciences, the Institute for Stem Cell Science, and the Azim Premji Foundation worked together in May 2020 to strengthen the testing infrastructure to address the coronavirus pandemic.
The organisation has issued a warning regarding bogus donation requests in emails that purport to be from the charity.