Christmas go ahead for Motorola plant
Groundbreaking for Motorola Polska's software manufacturing operations in Krakow will begin in December, a Motorola official said last week.
Motorola Polska will start building the high-tech plant to house its software center, one of 19 software engineering and production facilities worldwide, said Margaret Nadworny, the managing director of the company's software centers in Central and Eastern Europe.
The company will relocate from temporary facilities provided by the Jagiellonian University after the building has been completed in 12 to 15 months, said Tomasz Mokrogulski, the country manager of Motorola Polska and the regional sales manager of the parent company's broadband communications sector in Eastern Europe. "We will be able to employ a larger number of engineers all coming from national universities," he said. The company expects its employee roster to jump to 500 by next year after the relocation to the new facility, he said.
Tomasz Kulisiewicz, editor in chief of Teleinfo, a magazine that covers the telecommunications industry, said that the center's expansion might bode well for Poland's small software export business, which accounts for only $80 million of the country's total market production value of about $2 billion.
Kulisiewicz said that a similar software development center established in Gdansk by the Danish software manufacturer Olicon and a research and development center created in Bydgoszcz by Lucent Technologies signaled foreign operators' interest in setting up software production facilities in Poland.
"We are quite late (with software manufacturing) because a lot of Hungarians have been making software for other mobile operators, such as Siemens and Nokia," he said.
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