IBM left India. Wipro walked into the gap.

IBM was forced out of India. A cooking-oil company took the gap.

Written on 06 June 2026, based on public reports at that time.

In the late 1970s, the Indian government told IBM to dilute its ownership or leave. IBM refused and walked out of the country.

For most Indian businesses, this was chaos. The largest computer company in the world, the one that had trained the engineers and defined the market, was suddenly gone. Customers were stranded. The market looked broken.

One man read the same event differently.

Azim Premji was running a company his late father had built, called Western India Vegetable Products. It made hydrogenated cooking oil and soap. He had just renamed it Wipro. He had no background in computers.

But where everyone saw a broken market, Premji saw an undefended one. IBM’s exit had not destroyed the demand for computers in India. It had only removed the supplier. The customers were still there. What was missing was someone willing to walk into a vacuum that looked, to everyone else, like a disaster.

Here is the part the story usually skips. It was not an overnight success. Wipro spent years as a small, unremarkable hardware maker before the software business that made it a giant even existed. Premji had seen the door. Then he spent more than a decade walking through it. Today Wipro earns more than Rs. 90,000 crore a year.

I think about this often when I advise businesses through disruption. The instinct of almost everyone in the room is to ask how bad the damage is. The rarer instinct, the one that builds companies, is to ask what just became available that was not available yesterday.

But seeing the door is the easy part. Almost anyone can spot an opening in hindsight. The ones who build are willing to spend the unglamorous decade walking through it.

Most people stare at what left. The few who build stare at what remains, and then they wait.