Qualcomm Inc (QCOM)

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Qualcomm hires in India, eyes growing mobile market



By S. Srinivasan
ASSOCIATED PRESS
8:34 a.m. May 27, 2004

BANGALORE, India – Digital wireless technology company Qualcomm, Inc. is hiring engineers in India to design mobile phone chips and provide technical support to Asian clients, company officials said Thursday.
The San Diego-based company is also eyeing the country's fast-growing mobile market, where nearly 2 million new connections are sold each month.

"India is the hottest growth market for Qualcomm. It is also where a lot of talent is available," Brian Dunphy, Qualcomm's director of business development, told reporters in Bangalore, the center of India's high-tech industry.

The company has set up a research and development center in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad to design mobile phone chipsets, the basic set of integrated circuits that run such devices.

About 100 engineers will be hired by the end of 2004, he said. They will be fresh recruits, he noted, and will not replace engineers in the United States.

Qualcomm will also open a support center in Bombay within six months for customers in the Asia-Pacific region.

With Western markets for new connections becoming saturated, mobile phone companies and software firms such as Qualcomm, which focus on wireless technology, are in search of new, expanding markets.

India and China are among the world's fastest growing markets for mobile phones. The number of cell phones in India is expected to surpass the number of fixed phones by the year end.

"India is hotter than even China for us," Dunphy said.

He said Indian phone company Tata Teleservices has begun offering a mobile phone feature – based on Qualcomm software – that lets its customers use the phone like a walkie-talkie. The "Push to Talk" feature, launched Thursday, is cheaper than normal calls, facilitates quick communication and supports teleconferencing.

This is the first time the feature, common in the United States, is being introduced in India.

Qualcomm invented a major strain of digital cellular technology: CDMA, or Code Division Multiple Access. The company sells CDMA chips to phone makers and charges royalties for phones that use the technology, whether or not they use Qualcomm's chips

In India, Global System for Mobile Communications, or GSM, is the popular standard. However, CDMA phones have gained popularity recently.

Tata Teleservices, a CDMA phone company, has 1.7 million subscribers and hopes to have 10 million customers within one year.

Qualcomm employs 7,400 people and had revenues of US$3.7 billion in fiscal year ended September 2003.

On the Net:

Qualcomm: www.qualcomm.com


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