April 19, 2006

Nokia Corp. announced plans to bolster its research and development operations in China.

That move will add wireless network product development to its center in Chengdu in order to be more responsive to customer needs as they emerge in the market.

“The Chinese mobile market is seeing tremendous growth and digital convergence is coming to the mobile mass market in China,” explained Jouni Pirhonen, had of Nokia’s Chengdu R&D Center.

“We aim to develop Nokia Chengdu R&D Center into one of the major R&D centers for Nokia core networks, developing products for mobile and convergence communications for the global markets.”

Nokia’s Chengdu R&D Center, established in 2005, began as a unit for Internet Protocol Multimedia Subsystem-based applications.

The expansion is expected to expand the center’s scope to development of carrier grade platform middleware, WAP gateways for mobile browsing, intelligent packet core subsystems and increasing multimedia applications development.

Nokia’s announcement comes as wireless infrastructure vendors position themselves to profit from China’s soon-to-be-awarded third-generation network licenses.

Once licenses are granted by the government, Chinese carriers are expected to invest heavily in W-CDMA gear, building networks to serve China’s estimated 400 million customers.

The Chinese government has said it plans to wow the world with 3G technology during the 2008 Summer Olympics to be held in Beijing.

It’s still not clear how large of a role the home-grown TD-SCDMA technology will have in China’s 3G buildout.

Most analysts agree that GSM will dominate the Chinese mobile landscape for the next five to eight years, with CDMA2000 1x EV-DO likely squeezed out by W-CDMA and TD-SCDMA.

Source: RCR