Altera to expand in India, Malaysia

Programmable semiconductor maker Altera Corp plans to more than double staff at a Malaysian facility to 1,000, the company said on Thursday as it opened a sales office in India targeted at hardware designers.

Ben Lee, vice-president of sales for the Asia-Pacific region, told a news conference that Altera, which supplies designs and components to firms like Nokia, plans to expand its design and technical facility at Penang in Malaysia.

It will more than double its staff, which now numbers around 350 but the time-frame would depend on revenue, he said.

"We have plans to grow the Penang facility to 1,000 employees, mostly engineering," Lee said.

Company officials said in India's technology city of Bangalore they saw huge potential in the country as microchips explode in variety and become loaded with software, which India churns out.

"Globally India is known as a software powerhouse but that's rapidly changing to the point where you have companies like Wipro having hundreds of hardware engineers," Lee said, referring to New York-listed Wipro, India's No. 3 software service exporter.

Lee gave no projections on sales volumes or figures for the Indian market, saying only Asia-Pacific numbers were given by the company, but added business from India had grown 10 times in the past six years without a local office to push sales.

Altera on Wednesday forecast flat revenue growth at $177 million to $184 million in the current fourth quarter.

The Asia-Pacific region's share was $107 million, or about 9.0 percent of the company's revenue last year, and the share had doubled to 18 percent this year, Lee said.

Altera, based in San Jose, makes tools to help build end-use microchips and aims at India's software companies, defence laboratories, hardware design startups and automotive industries.

Altera has three local partners offering design consultancy using its technologies and seeks more collaborations, Lee said.