Motorola opens applied research center

BANGALORE: Motorola, one of the world's largest cell phone companies, has announced the opening of Motorola Labs India in Bangalore which will focus on applied research in the areas of converged networks, autonomic networking, enterprise applications and embedded systems and physical sciences. The center will initially hire around 40 people and plans to grow this workforce by 20 per cent year on year.

"The center will focus on working on aspects that supports the idea of seamless mobility. Our already existing R&D center, which was opened in 1991, does more development and design oriented work and employs close to 2000 people now," said Padmasree Warrior, Executive VP and CTO of Motorola.

The company elucidated that Motorola's R&D investment in Inid has grown this year to $85 million, up from approximately $50 million in 2002. It plans to grow this investment by 20 per cent per year.

"We see the Indian centers as hubs for development of products specific to emerging markets which includes India as well as APAC regions. By mid next year in fact, we see products emerging which is made more specifically to fit conditions in these markets," said Amit Chaudhery, Communications and Corporate affairs head, India.

Motorola claimed 15 to 20 per cent marketshare in the mobile phone segment in India. According to Warrior, nearly 40 per cent of the software needed for the phones are created in the Bangalore development center. The company, which had sales of $31.3 billion 2004, said that they will be opening a Hyderabad center later during this year.