Motorola to ramp up headcount in B’lore

Motorola to ramp up headcount in B’lore
Deccan Herald

Motorola India, Indian affiliate of the US-based Motorola Inc, plans to increase its headcount at its Bangalore R&D facility by 1000 at the end of 2006. This was disclosed by Motorola Inc Chairman & Chief Executive Officer, Edward J Zander while addressing a press conference, here on Tuesday.

The Bangalore facility already is home to 2500 R&D specialists and 400 people involved in marketing, sales and other activities. Briefing reporters Mr Zander said, “Bangalore felt like silicon valley, when I went to meet our employees at the R&D facility. The Indian market is important to us from two aspects viz the business opportunity and secondly, the ability to interact with the brightest talent in the industry.” He also acknowledged the fact that Motorola has not concentrated much on India in the past and that they needed to focus on marketing and sales to get their Indian arm going.

Motorola established its R&D facility at Bangalore in 1991. Between April and July ’05 it lauched the Motorola Labs, here. The new R&D centre houses the company’s Core Networks Division (CND) and the Embedded Communications Computing (ECC) and will contribute towards the making of telecom applications and products across CDMA, GSM and UMTS networks for the Indian Market, all in tune with providing ‘Seamless Mobility’ products and solutions.

Motorola also has plans of launching a low end GSM mobile phone in India soon, costing less than US$ 40. This phone would be supplied to service providers in the country, who will sell it along with a mobile connection. The company with a current cell phone market share of 18 per cent, is essentially looking at back end operations like distribution and assembly of some of its products, here, and will foray into manufacturing in the country only when the volume of business goes up.