Munich-based test and measurement equipment company Rohde & Schwarz has launched Rohde & Schwarz Asia—the first regional headquarters outside Germany with management responsibility for all business activities in the Asia Pacific—in conjunction with the official opening of its new premises at Changi Business Park in Singapore.
In line with this, the key management and corporate activities for Asia, which are currently driven by Munich Headquarters, will now be located in Singapore. Dr. Erich Freund, Managing Director of Rohde & Schwarz Asia Pacific, will also be based in the new Asian headquarters in Singapore.
"Asia is one of the biggest market segments for Rohde and Schwarz. We have here companies, standardization groups, and governments, which are doing their own decisions regarding new developments, new specifications, and new standards. And they will create new standards, which will also be introduced in other parts of the world," says Michael Vohrer, President and CEO of Rohde & Schwarz GmbH & Co. KG. "Therefore, it is important to be here, and to contribute to what is going on here; to have access to the standardization group and so on; to listen carefully and to have discussions with our Asian customers on what they are doing, what are their requests, to fulfill these by having these information very early and to put it into our instruments."
He added that Asia is the region with the biggest growth in the past 15 years within Rohde & Schwarz and has enormous market potential. "Setting up the Asian headquarters is a significant move for Rohde & Schwarz to strengthen our position in the market. We have to make important decisions fast and close to the market place. Singapore, with its excellent infrastructure and expert talent pool in engineering, is the perfect place for high-tech industry such as ours," says Vohrer.
To strengthen Rohde & Schwarz's position in Asia Pacific in all of its key business fields—test and measurement, broadcasting, secure communications, and radiomonitoring and radiolocation—the company has announced a strong increase of the existing R&D capabilities. In addition to the existing system engineering and support activities, the R&D centre will focus on the development of additional high-tech products to enlarge the Rohde & Schwarz product portfolio. "We have made our headquarters here in Singapore much stronger compared in the past, and with more development engineers to adapt the basic units of platform solutions from Germany to the needs of the markets here in Asia," says Vohrer.
Rohde & Schwarz Asia plans to dramatically increase the size of its staff by recruiting experts and professionals from the region. "Singapore has a very good reputation in engineering technologies. Rohde & Schwarz Asia will complement Singapore's ambition to become a world-class engineering hub by providing excellent engineering jobs in the wireless arena," says Dr. Freund. In this respect, Rohde & Schwarz will launch a scholarship program with two leading universities and for the first time we will hold an engineering competition involving the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the Nanyang Technological University (NTU).
Rohde & Schwarz Singapore was incorporated in 1997 as the first systems house and technical centre of competence outside of Germany, focusing mainly on test and measurement technology. Since then, it has continuously expanded its operations. In 2004, Rohde & Schwarz, as part of its effort to enhance its Asian Pacific presence, established its regional headquarters in Singapore (RSRHQS), primarily to manage and coordinate the activities of its offices in the region.
