"Nokia is confident of India''s skilled labour force''s ability to handle the manufacturing of high-end network infrastructure elements, such as base station controllers. Chennai was a natural choice for us as we are already establishing a production facility there," said Simon Beresford-Wylie, executive vice president and general manager, Networks, Nokia.

In April, Nokia had announced plans to set up a mobile device production facility in Chennai. base station controller production will begin at the same time with terminal production, during the first half of 2006. With this, Nokia becomes the only telecom vendor in India to manufacture both network infrastructure and terminals in the country.

The announcement comes in the wake of fast expansion of networks in the Indian market based on aggressive plans of all the GSM service providers over the next few years. In India, Nokia Networks is a leading GSM infrastructure equipment supplier and supplies to all of the top five GSM operators in the country.

"India is already amongst the top five telecom markets in the world and is set to reach the third position in the next few years. In order to sustain this growth, rapid expansion of mobile networks will be essential. Nokia''s investment in local base station controller manufacturing aims to meet this requirement and reiterates its long standing commitment to India," said Beresford-Wylie.

"Base Station Controller manufacturing is high end and complex and will allow us to tap into the talented engineering pool in India, in addition to creating additional employment," he added. Nokia''s operations in India now include three R&D facilities and an upcoming manufacturing facility in Chennai that will produce both terminals and GSM infrastructure equipment. The end-to-end operations strengthen Nokia''s complete solution offering and uniquely position it to work with Indian operators to reduce time to market for both network equipment and terminals and achieve the Government''s target of 200 million mobile subscribers by 2008.