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Agere opens local support center

Leading US storage and networking chip designer Agere Systems Inc opened a service support center in Taipei yesterday, its third such center in the Asia-Pacific region after Shanghai and Sydney.

Starting with a team of seven engineers, the center aims to support firms integrating Agere chips in devices that connect wirelessly to the Internet, and the company hopes to double or triple its local workforce as business grows in Taiwan, executive vice president Ron Black told the Taipei Times at a press conference.

"Today about 60 percent of our revenue comes from Asia," Black said. "It's our fastest growing region and that's why we're opening so many of these design centers and support centers in the region. Key to customer service is having local talent, and Taiwan has absolutely incredible talent with a lot of knowledge of communications, networking and PC architectures, so we think it's going to be a key area for us moving forward."

Agere has had a presence in Taiwan for 13 years as a division within US telecommunications conglomerate Lucent Technologies Inc. The company is currently investing "a few million dollars" in an expansion of its sales office in the Hsinyi District of Taipei to offer more design support for its Taiwanese customers, Black said.

Three years ago, Agere spun off as an independent company from Lucent to concentrate on chip design for storage disks and mobile networking devices. The company now outsources the manufacture of its chip designs to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), and numbers local firms such as notebook giant Compal Electronics Corp (仁寶) among its customers, Black said yesterday. Agere also supplies chips to many international names like Apple Computer Inc, Hewlett Packard Co and NEC Corp which manufacture their products here.

The Taipei support center has been in operation for a few months, and has already managed to sign up five original design manufacturer companies, Black said without naming them.

"Our customers are going to be producing boards and products by March, so we already think the center has already paid itself back," Black said.

Agere recorded its first profits in the third quarter of last year. The company is scheduled to announce its fourth quarter results on Jan 27.

Statistics show that Taiwan is a leading center of development for wireless networking products. Taiwan is expected to ship almost US$2 billion in wireless local access network products this year alone, according to the Market Intelligence Center (MIC), up from an estimated US$1.8 billion last year. Taiwan also produces over two thirds of the world's laptops, MIC reports, and wireless Internet access is being included in the latest models to roll off production lines.
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