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Grizzly Bulls’ Billionaires Index

⬅ # 186 Tony Ressler|# 188 Chris Xu ➡

# 187 Azim Premji 

$11.2B

Real Time Net Worth
as of 5/13/2024
$1.5M (0.01%)

# 187 Azim Premji 

$11.2B

Real Time Net Worth
as of 5/13/2024
$1.5M (0.01%)
OccupationFounder Chair, Wipro
Source of WealthSoftware Services
Age78
ResidenceBangalore, India
Marital StatusMarried
Children2
EducationBS, Stanford University
Age-Adjusted Net Worth$3.32B
Azim Premji
Azim Premji
India
Net worth: $11.2B

Self-Made Score 

Wealth History

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Biography

Early Life and Education

Azim Premji completed his schooling in Mumbai.
In 1966, he returned to India from Stanford University after his father's death, leaving his electrical engineering studies incomplete.
Premji returned over 30 years later to complete his engineering degree in 1999.
At the age of 21, amidst a shareholder revolt, he became the chair of Wipro, expanding its product line to include hydraulic cylinders, soaps, and lighting products, renaming the company Wipro in 1977.

Notable Accomplishments

Wipro, founded in 1945 as Western India Vegetable Products Ltd., transitioned into an IT company in 1980 under Azim Premji's leadership.
In the 1980s, Wipro ventured into manufacturing hydraulic tipping systems, industrial cylinders, and formed a joint venture with General Electric in 1989.
Following India’s economic deregulation in 1991, Wipro diversified into manufacturing various products and entered the IT services business in the 1990s.
In 1999, Wipro became the only Indian computer manufacturer with Y2K-compliant certification.
Under Premji's leadership, Wipro's revenues grew from around $2 million in the late 1960s to nearly $2 billion in IT revenue in 2017.

Wealth and Philanthropy

Azim Premji is known for his philanthropy, having pledged to donate the majority of his wealth to charity.
He has already given away $21 billion, making him the first Indian to join the Giving Pledge.
Premji gifted two-thirds of his Wipro stock to the Azim Premji Foundation, established in 2001 to enhance primary education in India.
He has built an ethical company and is committed to specific core values, focusing on creating high-performance teams.

Legacy

Wipro continued to perform well in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with IT remaining its core business.
It opened a Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) unit in 2002 and was one of the best-performing stocks from 1998 to 2003 on the Indian stock exchanges.
Wipro achieved SEI Level 5 certification under Premji's leadership, emphasizing a culture of excellence in business operations.
Azim Premji stepped down as Wipro's chair in July 2019, passing the reins to his son Rishad, with the company reporting annual revenue of $7.4 billion in 2018-2019.

Corporate Structure and Management

Azim Premji became Wipro's CEO in 2005 after the exit of Vivek Paul.
The company had joint CEOs until 2011, followed by a reversion to a single CEO.
Wipro added a COO to support the CEO, focusing on global operations and strategies.
After the 2008 financial crisis, Wipro restructured its business model to find new opportunities outside the U.S. market.
Under Premji's leadership, Wipro’s revenues grew from around $2 million in the late 1960s to nearly $2 billion in IT revenue in 2017.

Family Wealth Management

Azim Premji has his family wealth management company, PremjiInvest, managing around $3 billion of his wealth and investing in public and private companies.

How long would it take you to become as rich as Azim Premji?

If you started with $10,000 and invested an additional $500 each month at a 44.01% CAGR, it would take you 5 years to reach Azim Premji's net worth of $11.2B.

Is this realistic? It depends how closely the VIX-TA-Macro Advanced model performs to its history in the future. Since Grizzly Bulls launched on January 1, 2022, it's returned 40.45% compared to 10.08% for the S&P 500 benchmark.

Enter data in all but one field below, then calculate the missing value

Azim Premji is very wealthy, but what's stopping you from reaching that same level of success? As summarized in our five fundamental rules to wealth building, becoming wealthy in a modern capitalist economy is not complicated. There's actually only three variables:

  1. Your starting capital
  2. Your earnings after expenses
  3. The compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of your savings

Most people start with zero or very little, so if you weren't born into wealth, don't fret! The majority of the fortunate folks listed in our Grizzly Bulls’ Billionaires Index came from middle class or lower backgrounds. The most distinguishing characteristic of the group is their ability to consistently earn a high CAGR on their savings.

Every billionaire has a unique strategy to achieve high CAGR. For Azim Premji, Software Services is the primary source. Whether you choose to invest your savings in your own businesses or the businesses of others is not as important. The salient piece of the puzzle is ensuring that your hard-earned savings are generating sufficient CAGR to reach your long term goals.

Most people simply invest their money in index funds and call it a day. There's nothing wrong with this approach, but it guarantees relative mediocrity. To achieve greatness, you need to invest your money to earn higher than average returns. In the long run, better investors will always finish ahead of better earners.

Source: Grizzly Bulls reporting

Methodology: Grizzly Bulls' Billionaires Index is a daily ranking of the world's billionaires and richest people. Grizzly Bulls strives to provide the most accurate net worth calculations available. We pull data from public equity markets, SEC filings, public real estate records, and other reputable sources.

The index is dynamic and updates daily at the close of U.S. stock market trading based on changes in the markets, economy, and updates to Grizzly Bulls' proprietary algorithm of personal wealth calculation. Stakes in public companies are tracked daily based on the relevant closing prices of the underlying securities. Additionally, stakes in private companies, cash, real estate, and other less easily valued assets are updated periodically through careful analysis of insider transactions, comparable public company sales / EBITDA multiples, etc.

Edited by: Lee Bailey