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Ericsson bucks the trend, to double manpower in India

Baburajan K

The global telecom giant Ericsson is planning to double the manpower in its software development centres in India, notwithstanding the parent's decision to cut jobs worldwide.

Ericsson India, which has software development centre in Bangalore and Hyderabad, will increase its manpower from 100 to 200 over a period of about 18 months with additional investments. However, the company will not set up new development centres in India in the near future.

"We do not want to comment on the investments for increasing the manpower. We are extremely bullish about the developments in the Indian telecom market and we have no plans to slash the total workforce of 500 in the country. We hope to grow the total workforce in phases," Ranjivjit Singh, director (consumer products) of Ericsson Communications said.

Recently, Ericsson, the world's largest supplier of telecom infrastructure, had announced its intention to cut jobs worldwide in order to bring down cost and improve profit. The Swedish firm has also imposed a recruiting freeze across all divisions globally.

According to Singh, Ericsson Communications is also setting up a hardware verification centre in Jaipur. Since the number of cellular subscribers is not growing in India as expected earlier, there are no plans to set up a handset manufacturing unit in the country, Singh added.

Ericsson has been associated with Indian telecom for over 100 years, since introducing its first product in 1903. Ericsson's digital switching systems handles over 75 per cent of the international calls through the VSNL gateway.

Ericsson has installed over 1.3 million fixed lines in India besides supplying telecom equipment infrastructure in the areas of switching and transmission to DoT, MTNL, defense and Indian Railways.

Ericsson has also established 23 of the 43 GSM (Global System for Mobile Communication) networks in India thereby commanding a marketshare of about 50 per cent and a geographic spread of over 90 per cent of GSM coverage in India.

Ericsson has also emerged strongly in the area of IP (Internet protocol) and Datacom, having bagged 11 out of 15 circle wide orders from DoT for Internets infrastructure, based on Tigris Multi Service Access Platform.

The company has over 40 per cent share of the GSM infrastructure market in India and the evolution to high-speed technologies will offer immense opportunities of growth for Ericsson.

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