Corporate, R&D, China, Asia: Nokia is set to strengthen its R&D in China by expanding its Chengdu R&D centre.

The development means the centre will assume partial responsibility for developing the mobile network infrastructure products necessary for global and local markets. Established in August 2005, Nokia’s Chengdu R&D Centre started as a focused R&D unit for IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) based communications applications.

To attain more direct responsiveness to emerging customer needs in this market, Nokia has decided to further expand the scope of the Chengdu Centre scope, engaging in development of systems such as carrier grade platform middleware, WAP gateways for mobile browsing, intelligent packet core subsystems and enhanced multimedia applications development. Expansion at Chengdu will also capitalise on the favourable competence base in China, and develop a better alignment with the Chinese mobile communications market, a key global growth driver.

For Jouni Pirhonen, Head of the Chengdu Centre: "The Chinese mobile market is seeing tremendous growth and digital convergence is coming to the mobile mass market in China. The expansion of our Chengdu R&D Centre will significantly strengthen our product creation responsiveness to evolving customer requirements in China…We aim to develop Nokia Chengdu R&D Centre into one of the major R&D centres for Nokia core networks, developing products for mobile and convergence communications for the global markets."

www.nokia.com