Microsoft adds to Indian operation

SOFTWARE giant Microsoft is to expand its presence in India, shifting jobs from the US to take advantage of its lower labour costs and talented workforce.

Bill Gates' company, whose programmes run on nine out of 10 personal computers, is launching a customer support centre in the southern city of Bangalore. It is also considering US staff cutbacks while hiring Indian programmers.

'With lots of Englishspeaking talent, we were thinking of a better way to tap into that,' S Somasegar, Microsoft's vicepresident of Windows Engineering Services, was quoted as saying.

In recent years dozens of companies in Britain and other developed countries have started to outsource work to India. The shifts typically provoke angry protests from the affected workers at home.

'We expect to continue to invest in a technical workforce in India to assist us with our expanding product development, information technology and customer-support functions,' a spokeswoman for Microsoft in India said.

Microsoft already has about 200 Indian engineers at a centre in Hyderabad. It announced £250 million investments in India last November.