When a 23-year-old Vineet Agrawal joined Wipro in 1985, he had no grand career plans, just a modest intention of staying for “just two years”. “We’ll see,” he had said then.
Four decades later, he’s all set to leave a company he helped transform from a modest soap, lighting and vanaspati business into a global FMCG contender.
He was also amongst the early crop of Wiproites recruited from management campuses by the company’s former Chairman, Azim Hasham Premji, himself.
Come January 2026, Agrawal will retire as CEO of Wipro Consumer Care & Lighting and MD of Wipro Enterprises. But his legacy, etched across 40 years of acquisitions, brand reinventions and measured ambition, will stay.
It’s a tenure longer than his own marriage, he jokes. “I’ve been married 36 years, with Wipro, its been 40!.”
Back then, the business barely crossed ₹300 crore. “There were real questions back then, why is Wipro still in consumer products when IT is growing exponentially?” he recalls.
Few are aware that it was the small but dogged consumer care business that initially helped fund Wipro’s IT ambitions. Consumer care was the original backbone of the company.
In 2013, when Wipro demerged its non-IT business and delisted it by forming a separate private company called Wipro Enterprises, there were sceptics about whether the consumer care business would survive or be sold. Premji and leaders like Vineet were clear that the demerger and delisting, if anything, would allow them greater flexibility to scale the consumer care business and make it into a global player.
Today, it’s more than ₹10,000 crore and it operates in more than 60 countries. And at the heart of that journey is Santoor, a soap brand that once struggled to stay afloat, which was launched in 1985, the same year Agrawal joined the company. “We didn’t have massive budgets. But we had insight,” Agrawal says.
In the mid-1990s, when national expansion seemed out of reach, the team doubled down on a simple idea: focus where it’s strong and build from there. That hyperlocal approach sparked Santoor’s rise, and soon, “Santoor mom” became a fixture in Indian pop culture.
Behind the jingle and the glossy TV ads was a deeper narrative, one that evolved with Indian women.
“The woman in our ads changed with time,” Agrawal reflects. “She was first admired for her beauty, then her talent, then her work-from-home hustle, and eventually for wielding power, be it as a professor, a DCP, or a designer.”
That journey mirrored the brand’s and the country’s growth story.
Agrawal’s tenure was defined not just by brand-building, but by boldness. In 2007, he led the acquisition of Malaysia-based Unza, an equal-sized company with no cultural overlap.
“We had no play in body washes, deodorants, or roll-ons. But we took that leap,” he says.
That bet worked and gave Wipro the confidence to pursue 14 more acquisitions under his watch.
Ask him what’s changed most over 40 years, and Agrawal doesn’t talk about scale or strategy first; he talks about people.
“You learn how important it is to surround yourself with people better than you are and are not mere clones. That’s what pushes growth.” The humility he applies to management extends to acquisitions, too. “You don’t buy a company to teach them. You buy them because you couldn’t build it yourself. Respect that
From his IIT-Delhi and Jamanlal Bajaj Institute of Management days to becoming a CEO with factories in 17 locations, Agrawal’s style has remained grounded. “Engineering taught me discipline. Failures taught me humility. And success taught me to listen to consumers and to people,” he says.
Even now, he recalls how, in Wipro’s early days, Chairman Azim Premji would quietly walk store aisles, studying product placements. “He gave me the freedom to try. That trust made all the difference.” He is loath to talk about the next phase of his journey as he will still steer the fortunes of the company for the next six months.
However, given Premji and Wipro’s proclivity of somehow retaining an association with its veterans who helped build the company and the group, one wouldn’t be surprised if he still continues in some capacity with the larger organisation, though his communication folks deny any such moves in the offing.
For those who have stayed loyal and have contributed to the group’s growth, AHP as Premji is known internally, never puts out people to pasture but rather utilises their experience and insight through some sinecure in associated activities of the group. .
Just as Ashok Narasimhan, Ashok Soota, PS Pai, Dr Sridhar Mitta, Vivek Paul, AL Rao, Sudip Banerjee, Sudip Nandy, Girish Paranjape, TK Kurien, Dilip Ranjekar, Pratik Kumar, and a host of others, helped AHP build Wipro to the global company it is today, Agarwal in his quiet ways has contributed his bit.
A lesser-known fact is that Agrawal — a taciturn speaker who shuns the limelight — for decades has played a key role in building the public relations and CSR programmes of the group. He will leave behind a legacy of having successfully helped build a global FMCG company headquartered in Bengaluru.
Published on July 15, 2025