According to Martin Kinne, newly appointed vice-president of mobile devices for Siemens' Asia Pacific, the company will be able to claim 15 percent of the market in China by 2001 and even more in subsequent years.

Kinne said he is fully confident of the company's ability to realize these figures.

He bases his confidence on a combination of promising market prospects, Siemens's hefty investment in China and the company's advantageous position in the competitive market.

"The tremendous market potential in China imposes no limitation on the market demand for our products," he said. "The only limitation we see is our production capacity at present."

Siemens has set up a mobile phone production plant in Shanghai, its only mobile phone plant outside Germany. Annual production capacity of the plant presently stands at 5 million units.

According to Kinne, Siemens is trying to expand capacity at the Shanghai plant to 10 million units by next year through the installation of additional state-of-the-art production lines.

The company has budgeted US$1 billion for investment in China in the next five years and nearly half of it will be utilized in 2001, Kinne disclosed.

Besides the installation of new production lines in Shanghai, the Siemens vice-president revealed the investment next year will also go into the company's two R&D centers for mobile information and communications, located in Beijing and Shanghai, as well as into some co-operative projects with domestic telecommunications research institutes and related technology suppliers.

Siemens has recently signed a memorandum of understanding with Chinese Academy of Telecommunications Technology and Shenzhen-based Huawei Technologies to jointly develop TD-SCDMA (time division-synchronous code division multiple access) system, the solution for the third generation mobile networks.

Kinne claimed that Siemens's rich experience and cutting-edge technologies in IT, communications and application sectors have also helped build up his confidence.

(China Daily 11/06/2000)