Telecom network vendor Huawei on Thursday arranged a visit at its new Research & Development campus situated in Bangalore, India.
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This campus – with an initial investment of $170 million in one million sq. ft. area built on a 20 acre land – is home to 2,700 engineers – mainly Indians.
The R&D center has the capacity to accommodate around 5,000 resources. Huawei R&D Center chief operating officer Wilson Wang says the company will be achieving the 5,000 people mark in few years.
Incidentally, Huawei’s R&D center is completing 15 years in India after opening the facility with nearly 100 people in 1999. Huawei was one of the few ICT companies to identify the opportunities in India and India’s IT and software talent. Currently, companies such as Intel, Microsoft, HP, Dell, IBM, etc. have some presence in Bangalore.
Research and development is a main focus area for Huawei. But Huawei India does not have too many patents from the Bangalore R&D center to crow about. It generated 210 patents in the last four years.
On the other hand, Huawei had filed 41,948 patent applications in China, 12,453 under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT), and 14,494 outside China as of December 31, 2012. Among these applications, 30,240 patents have been granted, according to its website.
Huawei’s R&D investment
In 2014, Huawei invested between CNY39.5-40.5 billion in R&D, an increase of 28 percent over 2013. Huawei has cumulatively invested CNY188 billion in R&D over the last ten years. The Chinese telecom company has submitted 546 proposals for LTE core standards to 3GPP, accounting for nearly 25 percent of the world’s total.
Huawei’s R&D expenses totaled CNY30,090 million in 2012, accounting for 13.7 percent of the company’s annual revenue. Of the total R&D expenses, Huawei has invested CNY1,300 million in research.
Huawei R&D center in Bangalore
The new R&D center will focus on future-oriented technologies, generating patents from India, contributing to industry standardization, collaborating with peers & academia in R&D and support the digital transformation of the society.
The campus has an R&D Block, customer experience center, large cafeteria, multilevel car park and residential block for expat employees. Its customer experience center is showing the 5G solutions for the telecom operators.
The Bangalore center is also the largest and the most important R&D center of Huawei, outside of China. Huawei has 19 R&D centers in China alone. Its R&D focus enables the company to challenge Ericsson’s earlier dominance in the telecom network market and grew the total revenue to nearly $46 billion in 2014.
The India R&D center will continue to focus on development and delivery of high quality software platforms, components and applications for the various product lines of the parent company.
The India R&D center plays a key role in component development and delivery center of Huawei for the global markets and has ownership of almost all software platforms, components and products being developed in India.
India R&D center is engaged in developing software products and platforms in the areas of IP based Data transmission networks, Intelligent Networks, BSS, OSS, Terminal devices and future oriented technologies including SDN, Big Data, Cloud, Mobile Internet, Digital Services etc. The center has evolved as the biggest competence center for global product and solution delivery.
Huawei has over 70,000 product and solution R&D employees, comprising more than 45 percent of its total workforce worldwide. Huawei has set up 16 R&D centers in countries that include Germany, Sweden, the US, France, Italy, Russia, India, and China.
Baburajan K
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