Lucent to Hire 500 Engineers in India

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BANGALORE, India (Reuters) - Struggling telecoms gear maker Lucent Technologies (NYSE:LU - news), which reported a hefty loss this week, said on Wednesday it would hire 500 engineers in India as part of its global revamp plans.

Lucent's Inter-Networking Systems (INS) unit inaugurated on Wednesday its Indian software center in Bangalore where staff is expected to rise to 125 by June and 500 in two years, company officials told a news conference.

The unit's president, Ravi Gulati, said his division was a key area for Lucent as it changed from its past focus on circuit-switched networks to data-packet based ones that involve optical and wireless technologies.

Layoffs in Lucent, which announced 10,000 job cuts this year, were mainly in circuit-switching or marketing, while the India center would focus on writing software to go with the latest equipment to offer complete solutions to customers, Gulati said.

``While we are laying off people in some areas, we are hiring fast in the other areas,'' he said.

The beleaguered Lucent reported on Tuesday a $3.7 billion second quarter loss but its stock surged on hopes of an early turnaround. The results included $2.7 billion in restructuring charges.

The company said it had made 2,000 of the 10,000 job cuts it announced in January.

The India center, involving a $10 million investment in the first phase, was part of Lucent's efforts to bring high-end product development to the country, and will work round-the-clock with its U.S. counterparts, Lucent said in a statement.

``We aim to make the India development center the largest center worldwide in the network operation software arena in the next couple of years,'' Gulati said.

``I am not coming to India because the costs are low. It is the quality of work,'' he said.

He said Lucent's relations with Indian software companies would continue for low-end or maintenance work.

Personal Note: So it doesn't really mean a damn thing how much we spend for our children's "Quality" education. With 6.2 billion people on the planet, labor will always be cheaper somewhere else and that's where the jobs will migrate.

-- Guy Daley (guydaley@altavista.com), April 25, 2001


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