Huawei sets up its biggest R&D unit outside China in Bengaluru

With an investment of $170 mn, this is a first R&D centre by a Chinese company in India

Telecommunications major Huawei on Thursday launched a 5,000-seater research and development (R&D) center here, which is the company's largest such facility outside China and the first R&D center set up by any Chinese company.

The company said it has invested over $170 million (around Rs 1,050 crore) on setting up the center.

Since the beginning of its operations in India, around 15 years ago, Huawei has invested $600 million in the country. The company currently has around 5,700 employees in India across its facilities in Bengaluru, Chennai and Delhi national capital region (NCR). Of these, 2,700 engineers will work out of the new R&D facility. The company plans to recruit more engineers for its R&D team.

Among other things, the R&D teams of Huawei work on platform components in areas like wireless and fixed intelligence networks, intellectual property (IP)-based networks, devices like mobile phones, tablets, set top boxes, etc. With the planned expansion of this facility, the company may look at bringing more work here, Wilson Wang, chief operating officer (COO) of Huawei India R&D center said.

Besides India, Huawei has R&D centers at 16 places outside China.

"Huawei is proud to dedicate this R&D campus to India as a part of its commitment to contribute to Indian government's flag-ship agenda "Make in India"," said Wang. "The R&D center is aimed at playing a bigger role in the innovation journey of Huawei; creation of future-oriented technologies, generating patents from India, contributing to industry standardisation, collaborating with peers and academia in R&D and support the digital transformation of the society."

Separately, India has been a significant market for Huawei's mobile devices, and the company hopes that it will ship around two million smartphones to India in 2015, as against 1.5 million in 2014.

The company also reiterated its earlier target of touching a revenue of $2 billion from India, as against $800 million in 2013. The company did not share its India revenue for 2014.