Huawei to invest $150 mn on Bangalore R&D unit

This will be the first company-owned research facility outside China.

Chinese telecom equipment maker Huawei Technologies will invest $120-$150 million to set up its own R&D campus in Whitefield, Bangalore — the first company-owned research facility outside China. Work at the proposed site will start mid-July and the campus is expected to be ready by early 2013.

“Even though, we have R&D centres in countries like Sweden, UK, Italy, Turkey and the US, but we operate out of leased or rented premises. India will be the first country outside China, where we will be having our own campus accommodating the largest number of R&D engineers outside China,” said a company official.

According to highly-placed sources in the company, Huawei has already acquired about 20 acres in the Whitefield area of the city and has also obtained no objection certificates (NOCs) from several government departments including environment, aviation, water supply, electricity, pollution control and fire safety. “Work is in full swing for the laying of the foundation next month,” the sources said.

The campus will have one million square feet of built-up area that would accommodate 3,500-4,000 people. Huawei India has around 6,000 employees, of which 2,200 are engaged in R&D. The company’s R&D operations in India are located across three centres in Bangalore. Once complete, the company intends to consolidate its R&D operations in India out of its Whitefield campus. Globally, Huawei employs around 110,000 staff, 46 per cent of whom are R&D professionals. China has the biggest population of Huawei’s R&D engineers, around 40,000.

The R&D centre in India is engaged in developing platforms and middleware that cover applications and functionalities of most of its products. The centre also develops software for networking and enterprise solutions for its other businesses, like set-top boxes and mobile handsets. India is also a huge market for Huawei and the company continues to be the number one player in the telecom network equipment space. The company has reported revenues of $1.6 billion in 2010.

Recently, India’s second largest IT services company, Infosys had announced investing $125-150 million in setting up its own campus in Shanghai, China. Once complete, the Shanghai campus will be Infosys’ first company-owned campus outside India.