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Mr George Huang, COO, Huawei India R&D centre

V. Rishi Kumar

Hyderabad, June 30 Chinese technology major Huawei has filed for over 200 patents from its India R&D centre and continues to expand its operations with an accent on localisation.

The India R&D centre, its largest outside China, is part of the $16-billion Huawei Technologies’ 12 globally-dispersed research centres, seven of them located in China.

The company has provided a guidance of $22 billion and expects to invest $2.2 billion globally on research during 2008. Forty-eight per cent of the company’s staff of 83,000 are engaged in R&D.

The Chief Operating Officer of Huawei India R&D centre, Mr George Huang, told Business Line that the India centre has emerged as one of the key intellectual property generators for the corporation which has filed for nearly 27,000 patents worldwide. Last year, it ranked fourth in overall patent filings. Excerpts:

How is the research work complementing Huawei’s business?

Huawei embarked on its international expansion drive in 1996 and has been winning recognition from telcos. The company’s success is built on high levels of localisation, adaptation and customised solutions to meet the diverse needs of operators globally. The focus is on reducing total cost of ownership.

The India R&D centre was set up to leverage the local software development skills and develop telecom solutions for global markets. Employing over 1,600 Indian engineers, the Bangalore R&D centre is the largest overseas development centre and a key platform and component development delivery centre for Huawei.

The software platforms and components developed here have been used by multiple product lines of Huawei encompassing wireless, core network, application and software and deployed for a large number of customers including BT, Vodafone, T-Com and China Mobile.

How many innovations here have led to patents?

More than 200 patent applications have been filed from India. Huawei’s business is built on a strong IP base that ensures competitiveness in the global telecom equipment market. We continuously innovate for customers, investing about 10 per cent of our annual revenues. Last fiscal, we invested $1.6 billion globally in R&D.

What are the areas the India centre is working on?

The work covers architecture to software development, testing, and delivery to post-release support. The India centre is engaged in developing telecom solutions for next-generation networks, network management, platforms, mobile handsets and applications.

What are your engagements with carriers such as Bharti, Reliance, Tata Teleservices and BSNL?

Huawei India’s marketing and engineering support arm employs over 1,100 professionals based out of Gurgaon.

For Reliance Telecom, Huawei supplied technology to set up the GSM network across Bihar, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, West Bengal, Himachal, Assam and North East circles. It is the sole partner for Reliance’s nationwide GSM expansion.

It is also working on CDMA network for Reliance Communications. In the case of Bharti, Huawei has won a contract to deploy a network in Sri Lanka.

We are also working on a CDMA network for Tata Teleservices. For MTNL, we have worked on core its network while for BSNL, the work is in the Delhi circle.

Alongside Indian telcos, how are you engaged with Vodafone and BT?

A lot of platforms and components including protocol, operating systems and tools have been developed and delivered from the India centre for customers such as BT, Vodafone, and China Mobile.

What are your plans for the year?

We are recruiting telecom software engineers and plan to ramp up to over 2,000 by the year end. We deployed $200 million in India R&D and are investing an additional $100 million for another development centre in Bangalore. The emphasis is on localisation of operations, people and practices.

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