BANGALORE: Going by his word that Asia will be his company's primary focus to tap the potential and second largest market after United States, Intel supremo Dr Craig Barrett's love for this part of the world continues. This is clearly evident as his much hyped visit to the world's largest continent this year has not only enhanced his interest in this market but has also received his gifts such as labs, design center and promises of more investments.

In his sixth visit to India in as many years, he visited the city of Bangalore, rated as the fourth most dynamic hub by the UNDP report recently and promised additional investments in the country by the company. In a meeting with the state's chief minister, S M Krishna, they decided to launch an educational initiative to enhance the knowledge of the teachers in Karnataka. This will be a joint effort between the state and Intel.

Dr Barrett also opened a research and development laboratory set up jointly with Infosys Technologies in Bangalore. The Infosys-Intel Lab is the first e-business solutions lab of its kind and will focus on building practices on Intel architecture platform for the enterprise customers. Dr Barrett also launched the Infosys LegaCom Service, which enables companies to leverage their legacy assets as they migrate to open standards-based distributed architecture like Intel platforms.

However, during the four city tour of Dr Barrett, Bangalore seems to have lost the opportunity of attracting big investments to Penang, where Intel plans to set up a high-tech design center in the northern state. Intel also said that another center would be set up in Malaysia's Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC). The centers would be designing mainstream microprocessors and network processors, which are the highest "value-add" in the chip design chain. The microprocessor design center will be located at Intel's plant in Penang's Bayan Lepas Industrial Zone. The first chips out of these centers are expected to hit the market in 2003.

Earlier this week Dr Barrett urged Taiwan to move up the information technology production chain to research and design and leave low-cost manufacturing to rival China. "Taiwan is undergoing a transformation similar to that which happened in the United States about a decade ago, which is that manufacturing is tending to move to areas of lower cost - mainland China, for example," said Barrett, head of the world's leading chipmaker.

"There are some things that it makes sense to worry about, and there are other things that it makes sense to recognize that they are happening and then to move forward," Barrett told a news conference in Taipei. Taiwan firms were the world's third largest manufacturers of information technology products last year, but many local firms have moved production lines to China to tap its huge market and low land and labor costs.

Barrett said Taiwan companies, which provide components, designs and contract manufacturing for global customers such as Dell, Compaq and Ericsson, already had a strong base for moving up from a manufacturing role. "You have already succeeded, you have strengths to build upon, and you need to recognize you can build upon that strength rather than trying to protect what you already have," he said.

He said Taiwan was in the process of becoming "a country that will build off of that base and move up the value chain towards the creation and design of new components, new standards, new research and development".

The 100 engineers earmarked for this task are now training in the US and other Intel locations. Malaysia currently assembles, tests and packages Intel Pentium 4 processors, and Barrett gave his assurance that Intel, which has invested US$1.87 billion in Malaysia since 1972, would continue to use the country as the "cornerstone" for its manufacturing operations.