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Wipro Chairman: Outsourcing Due to US Skilled Worker Shortage John Boudreau,Dec10,2006 "I think Silicon Valley is well-positioned. It's expensive, it's got traffic problems, but those are manageable problems. There is a huge spark of creativity here. There is an ecosystem here that is huge. We can supplement that. We are not going to displace that," Azim Premji, chairman of Wipro Technologies said. Azim Premji has little patience for those who argue outsourcing is stealing high-paying American tech jobs. The chairman of Wipro Technologies, one of the Indian companies that have rewritten the rules of the global software services market, says the United States should be more worried about what is taught in its classrooms -- or, rather, what isn't. "You need more emphasis on mathematics in school," the 61-year-old billionaire said during a recent visit to Silicon Valley. "It's a building block."  Not Enough Engineers  In fact, there is a shortage of information technology engineers in the United States, said Premji, who in four decades has led Wipro from a US$2 million cooking-oil processing company to a $2.4 billion global technology player. In its most recent quarter, the Bangalore-based company reported $765 million in revenue, a 41 percent increase from a year earlier, with profits of $152 million, a 48 percent jump. Premji has strong ties to the valley. He studied at Stanford University during the mid-1960s, though his education was interrupted in his senior year when he had to return to India to run the family business after his father died. (He finished his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering about eight years ago through a special arrangement that allowed him to do correspondence work.) In 1992, Wipro set up U.S. headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., and launched its global business. Now the company has 61,000 employees worldwide, including about 1,000 in California. Premji, who owns about 82 percent of Wipro stock, sat down recently for an interview at Wipro's Mountain View.