Cisco mulls manufacturing in India

Announces $50 million investment for expanding Bangalore centre

Cisco Systems, the $25 billion networking gear provider, on Friday said it will consider India as a manufacturing base as it reaps the benefits of the burgeoning Asia-Pacific market.

The company which competes with peers such as Lucent and Nortel also said it will invest a further $50 million to expand its Bangalore development centre. This will be in addition to the $1.1 billion investment, John Chambers, president & CEO, committed to India recently for the next three years.

Speaking on the possibility of manufacturing networking routers, switches and the like, Chambers said: "I would not have looked into this decision if the Indian government had not discussed it with me. I will consider manufacturing here in phases and it will surely be through a contract manufacturing agreement."

"India is a great market for us as well as for talent. In 2001, we announced an investment of $200 million here and we have surpassed it. This fresh phase of $1.1 billion will take us further in India and we plan to double our employee base here to 3,000," Chambers said while talking about Cisco's India plans.

In fact, he was so bullish seeing Cisco's growth curve of 50 per cent in India, he said that India has the potential to grow ahead of China for Cisco as a market.

"Of course China is a great market for us and we invested in that market a decade ago and we will continue to invest there as well. India is in a major transition and this comprehensive investment in India will see the Indian development centre being the largest one outside the US for Cisco," he noted.

In addition to the 1,500 employees on its payrolls in India, Cisco has seven software vendors out of India with 4,200 committed resources working on Cisco projects.

"We would expect them to grow at a similar clip like we are growing and we are committed to grow through partnerships here as it is our global model," he said.