The electronics firm's new premises here will strengthen its position in Asia-Pacific.

The Munich-based test and measurement equipment company, Rohde & Schwarz, has launched its Regional Headquarters Asia in conjunction with the official opening of its new premises at Changi Business Park. In line with this, its key management and corporate activities for Asia-Pacific will now be based in Singapore. Most of these tasks were previously managed from the company's HQ in Munich.

"Asia is the region with the biggest growth in the past 15 years within Rohde & Schwarz and has enormous market potential. Setting up our Regional Headquarters Asia is a significant move for us to strengthen our position in the market. Companies, standardisation groups and governments in the region are pushing new developments, new specifications and new standards day by day," says Michael Vohrer, President and CEO, Rohde & Schwarz GmbH & Co. KG. "Therefore, it is important for us to be here - and to contribute to what is going on here, to listen carefully and to have discussions with our Asian customers on what we are doing."


R&D success

The location of the company's Asian hub is critical to its success. Singapore was a natural choice because of its links with the region. In addition, "Singapore, with its excellent infrastructure and expert talent pool in engineering, is the perfect place for a high-tech industry such as ours," says Vohrer.

To strengthen the company's position in Asia-Pacific in all its key business areas - test and measurement, broadcasting, secure communications, and radiomonitoring - the company has announced a strong increase in its R&D capabilities. In addition to the existing system engineering and support activities, the R&D centre will focus on the development of high-tech products to expand the company's product portfolio.

Like Rohde & Schwarz, Singapore has a long history of embracing innovation and emphasising excellence, and it is constantly reinventing itself to stay ahead of the global competition. According to Lee Yi Shyan, Minister of State for Trade and Industry, the Republic aims to increase its R&D spending to three per cent of GDP by 2010, or S$7.5 billion (US$5.5 billion) per annum, with two-thirds of this being privately funded research.

On the public front, A*STAR oversees a 3,000-man research community in 14 research institutions. Over the last five years, A*STAR has forged many fruitful partnerships with renowned universities and R&D institutes across 25 countries. To further encourage a culture of R&D within start-up enterprises, the Singapore government has also introduced broad-based tax incentives.

These initiatives go a long way in attracting multi-national corporations and leaders in their industries like Rohde & Schwarz to base their manufacturing and R&D centres here.


Importance of skilled manpower

Every successful R&D operation requires well-trained manpower. With Singapore's good reputation in engineering technologies, Rohde & Schwarz Regional Headquarters Asia will complement the city-state's ambition to become a world-class engineering hub by providing engineering jobs in the wireless arena.

Indeed, the company plans to increase its staff strength by hiring experts and professionals from the region. Presently, it has 150 employees, but with the new centre, that figure is expected to increase by about 100. Most will be engineers and technicians to bolster the facility's key function - R&D in the areas of advanced communications and broadcasting. "We have made our HQ here in Singapore much stronger, and it will have more development engineers to adapt the modular concept of platform solutions from Germany to the needs of the markets here in Asia," says Vohrer.

The company will also source local talent by launching two postgraduate scholarships for students from the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University for the Master of Science in Communications Electronics programme at the Technical University of Munich.

All in all, Rohde & Schwarz's new Asia-Pacific HQ bodes well for the company as well as for the R&D landscape in Singapore.