Motorola setting up design centre in Hyderabad

Motorola, a Fortune-100 company that provides seamless mobility products across broadband, embedded systems and wireless networks, is setting up a new design centre in Hyderabad.

The centre is being built by L&T at a cost of $9 million which will be leased by Motorola for 10 years.

The design centre is being set up to consolidate Motorola's operations in Hyderabad that is spread over two centres.

Motorola employs around 500 people in Hyderabad and the global software group at the Hyderabad facility develops user interaction software for GSM and third generation phones. The team develops features like two-way video telephony, multimedia messaging and advanced graphics.

Addressing a press conference, Padmasree Warrior, executive vice-president and chief technology officer of Motorola Inc, said, "We are setting up a new design centre for Motorola's global software group at Hitech City. The new centre is spread over an area of 2.8 acres and upon completion will be able to accommodate 1,000 engineers and researchers." The centre, she added, is expected to be ready by June 2006.

Responding to a query on whether Motorola was scaling its operations in India because of the cost benefits, Warrior said that it was the availability of talent that was the major driving force and not just cost-effectiveness.

"We are exploring opportunities," she added on being asked whether the company would consider manufacturing facilities in India.

Motorola employs around 2,000 people in India, and according to Sammy Sana, managing director (global software group), Motorola India, the company sees a growth of between 10 per cent and 15 per cent in future.

"A large part of the software and user interface used in the mobile phones that we manufacture globally is developed in India. Hyderabad contributes to a substantial portion of this," Sana added.

Motorola opened an applied research lab in Bangalore recently. The company had global sales of $31.3 billion in 2004.