Motorola moving units to China, India

“We are consolidating our design resources,” a Motorola spokeswoman said, adding that the move was partly aimed at trimming costs.

Motorola employs about 1,000 staff in Asia involved in microchip design, including about 200 in the northern India centres of Gurgaon and Noida outside New Delhi which have operated for about five years.

“Since most of the software and technical literature is in English, the English competency of Indian engineers is a distinct advantage,” said Gloria Shiu, Motorola’s senior communications manager for the semiconductor products sector in Asia Pacific.

The Schaumburg, Illinois, company and its rivals, including number one cell-phone maker Nokia of Finland, have suffered a slowdown in demand for mobile phones and wireless network equipment over the past couple of years.

But demand has once again picked up in recent months. In January, Motorola posted a higher-than-expected fourth-quarter profit, but sales in the wireless phone unit fell, hit by delays in deliveries of new products offering popular features such as integrated digital cameras and colour screens.

Echoing the protectionist sentiments in the US election campaign as American factory jobs flow to Asia, developed Asian centres such as Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong are also confronting a loss of jobs to lower cost Asian regions. A typical Singapore factory worker, for example, now earns around $7.14 an hour, compared with 53 cents in China, according a report last year by the Economic Review Committee.

Drawn by such low costs, multinational companies—from telecommunications to footware—have been turning in droves to India and China, nourishing a massive outsourcing industry.

“We see India as a country where electronics are becoming pervasive, so we want to be an intimate part of this growing and expanding market,” Shiu said in an e-mail reply to queries from Reuters.

—(Reuters)