Motor Vehicles and Parts News
- Freescale to hire more in China
Date: 17-Sep-2007 Sources: (Shenzhen Daily)
FREESCALE Semiconductor Inc., a U.S. maker of chips for cars and mobile phones, plans to increase hiring in China to accelerate product development.
'We want to expand in markets that offer growth,'Joe Yiu, Asia chairman of Austin, Texas-based Freescale, said Friday in Hong Kong, without providing details. The company has more than 1,000 engineers in Asia excluding Japan, out of an employee total of over 9,000, Yiu said.
Freescale is stepping up development of chips used to process mobile phone signals to meet demand from customers including Research In Motion Ltd. and Motorola Inc. Worldwide sales of mobile phones are expected to climb 14 percent to 1.13 billion units this year, research firm Gartner Inc. said.
The U.S. chipmaker, the third-largest supplier of semiconductors used in mobile phones, employs more than 400 engineers in Hong Kong and on the Chinese mainland, Yiu said. The company has more than 600 engineers in India, where in March it opened a design center in Noida, near New Delhi, to add to a facility in the southern city of Bangalore.
Freescale, which also supplies chips used in phone and networking equipment to customers including Shenzhen-based Huawei Technologies Co. and ZTE Corp., has design centers in Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Chengdu and Suzhou, in addition to Hong Kong.
Freescale moved its Hong Kong office to Phase 2 of Hong Kong Science Park, a government-funded office complex. Phase 2, which cost HK$3.8 billion (US$488 million) to build and opened Friday.
Freescale increased sales of mobile phone chips 11 percent to US$1.35 billion last year, behind Texas Instruments Inc. and Qualcomm Inc., according to Gartner. Freescale also makes chips used in cars for customers including General Motors Corp.
Freescale, which was bought by a group of private equity companies led by Blackstone Group LP in December, said in a statement sales in the three months to June 29 fell 14 percent from a year earlier to US$1.38 billion.
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