Intel India to invest over $120 million to expand its Bangalore R&D centre

The expansion of Intel's facility in Bangalore is expected to be completed by mid-2015, and once up and running, it will be a global centre of excellence for chip design, the US-based firm said.

"The India centre makes significant contributions to the entire product portfolio offered by Intel. Our new capacity in Bangalore will give us the right resources to make a meaningful difference as the company moves into exciting areas like the Internet of Things," Intel India President Kumud Srinivasan said.

This move reinforces Intel's commitment to invest and grow in India, he added.

Intel logged revenues of $52.7 billion and a net income of $9.6 billion in 2013.

Intel India has been involved in businesses across segments - servers, PCs such as all-in-ones and 2-in-1s, smartphones, tablets and the Internet of Things.

The core competencies of the Indian operations, include CPU, system-on-a chip, software and graphics.

The company has more than 4,200 employees in India, a major growth market for the chipmaker, and a large number of them are engaged in R&D.

Notably, last week, Intel announced its plans to reduce its global workforce of 107,000 by about 5 percent in 2014. The announcement, equivalent to over 5,000 positions, comes a day after Intel posted a fourth-quarter earnings report that did little to dispel concerns about a slowing PC industry.

Talking about the reasons for the job cuts, an Intel spokesperson said it was struggling with falling personal-computer sales, shifts focus to faster-growing areas, a company spokesman said on Friday.

"This is part of aligning our human resources to meet business needs," spokesman Chris Kraeuter said.

Intel dominates the PC chip industry, but it has been slow to adapt its processors for smartphones and tablets, markets now dominated by rivals such as Qualcomm Inc and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd.

Intel has both added and shed significant numbers of jobs over the past decade. Struggling to fend off a challenge by smaller rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc in 2006, Intel announced it would reduce its workforce by over 10,000 positions, but its overall number of employees has grown since then.

The chipmaker is also not the only tech company to trim its workforce because of slowing demand for PCs since Apple's iPad started to cut into demand for laptops in 2010. Hewlett-Packard Co is in the midst of a years-long internal restructuring that would ultimately see it shed 34,000 jobs, or 11 percent of its workforce, through fiscal 2014.

(Written with agency inputs)