Nokia expands R&D in China — MobileMonday Global: Industry News

^{600 people} Nokia expands R&D in China

22 May 2004 at 15:43 GMT Timo Poropudas

Nokia announced Friday in Beijing an expansion of its Research and Development (R&D) undertakings in China. This expansion includes the launch of a Nokia Postdoctoral Program, the creation of a unit to promote open standards and technology localization, and the establishment of a CDMA R&D facility in Beijing. The announcements also include a plan to expand the scale of product design and development for Nokia mobile phones at the Nokia Product Creation Center in Beijing. "China is definitely a strategic part of Nokia's global R&D network," said Jorma Ollila, CEO of Nokia. "With increasing depth in China's talent base and an improving regulatory environment for R&D, we see excellent opportunities to expand our collaboration with leading domestic institutions. This cooperation will boost technology innovation and localization, enabling us to strengthen our R&D in key areas and respond to Chinese customer needs," Ollila said. Nokia China has been granted approval by the Ministry of Personnel to run a Postdoctoral Program. The program will provide educational and research opportunities for postdoctoral researchers to work on advanced telecommunication technology research projects at the Nokia Research Center (NRC) in China. Postdoctoral researchers will concentrate on areas such as Asian user interfaces, 3G and other radio technology, IPv6 and Chinese mobile applications. As the leading company in the mobility industry, Nokia is committed to open platform technologies and standards and cooperation to spur the growth of the domestic industry. This will be aided by the establishment of a Nokia technology platforms unit in China. The unit will work with the Chinese developer community through Forum Nokia, and will be responsible for the licensing of Nokia Series 60 platform and Java technologies and make contribution to standardization activities in China. Nokia also published plans to establish a CDMA R&D facility in Beijing. The new R&D facility will focus on software support and technical expertise in CDMA technology. Nokia stated that 40% of the global Mobile Phones Business Group handsets will be designed and developed in the Beijing Product Creation Center. As one of the main Mobile Phones R&D sites globally, the Center will be dedicated to key emerging markets through the development of low cost, innovative products for entry-level consumers. Established in 1999, the Beijing Product Creation Center has successfully developed products like N2100 and N6108, which have been successful not only in the Chinese market, but also in Asia and the rest of the world. Under the announced new initiatives today, it will have five R&D units in China employing more than 600 people. In 2003, nearly 20,000 employees - almost 40% of Nokia's total personnel - worked in the area of research and development. 12 000 of them worked in Finland.