Motorola has announced an expansion entailing 1,400 research and development jobs, which, it is understood, will include around 140 new jobs at its software development plant in Cork, reports Eoin Licken from Monte Carlo.

Speaking at UMTS '99, the annual conference for third-generation mobile telephony, Mr Ted Hally, vice-president and general manager of Motorola's GSM products division, said 500 of the new jobs would be in the areas of GSM and UMTS (Universal Mobile Telephony Service). He said the Chicago-based equipment and software supplier would move additional GSM software development to Cork, creating more than 100 extra jobs.

The company employs 1,500 people in Ireland, 375 of them in Cork, working principally on the development of network management systems for GSM digital cellular networks. UMTS, the next generation of cellular telephony, is expected to begin service in Europe in 2002.