Mellanox Opens Singapore Headquarters

A first of its kind in the region for Mellanox, the joint office and hi-tech solutions center is expected to be fully operational by November.

Data center solutions provider Mellanox has announced the opening of its new APAC headquarters and solutions center in Singapore. The company’s new Asia headquarters will feature a technology solution center for showcasing the latest technologies from Mellanox, in addition to an executive briefing facility. The solution center will feature the innovative solutions enabled by latest Mellanox technologies including HPC, cloud, big data, and storage.

“Mellanox Technologies’ headquarters in Singapore will be our first physical presence in Asia outside of China and Japan, hosting groups of business professionals and engineering teams,” said Charlie Foo, vice president and general manager, Asia Pacific, Mellanox Technologies. “The new office will help us to strengthen and accelerate our business across Asia Pacific, and foster further collaborations with our partners and customers.”

A first of its kind in the region for Mellanox, the joint office and hi-tech solutions center is located in Suntec City Tower 3, and is expected to be fully operational by November this year. The new APAC headquarters will house business and R&D teams to accelerate the region's revenues and solutions development around Mellanox’s interconnect technology.

Citing the centrality of Singapore, maturity of tech adoption in the market and strong talent pool as some of the primary reasons behind the investment, Foo said key markets for the company include Singapore, Japan, India, Korea, Australia and New Zealand, as well as emerging markets across Southeast Asia.

“With this operational expansion, we intend to focus on and better serve our key market sectors, including the government of Singapore, higher education facilities in Australia, and cloud service providers across the region. In doing so, we intend to strengthen our footprint in Asia,” he added.

Mellanox is already currently working with major brands in the region such as Monash University and the National Computational Infrastructure in Australia, Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in India, Fujitsu and SAKURA Internet in Japan, Samsung in Korea as well as the Singapore Exchange and the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*Star) in Singapore.

PACCAR Environmental Technology Building, Washington State University, Pullman, WA

Cost: 42 million

Project team: Research Facilities Design (laboratory planner); LMN Architects of Seattle, Wash. (prime architect); Skanska Construction (contractor); PAE Consulting Engineers, Inc. (building MEP)

This new 96,000 sq. ft. building at Washington State University will house interdisciplinary science and engineering programs advancing new technologies in sustainable materials, atmospheric research and water quality. The laboratory includes a Composite Materials and Engineering Center, the Laboratory for Atmospheric Research and Civil and Environmental Engineering. Support Spaces require tightly controlled environments and structural testing capabilities, high bay spaces, rooftop research terrace and collaborative spaces.

Housing a wide range of research and education activities, WSU’s leadership in clean technology is helping drive the creation of new construction and agricultural industries that will help reduce the region’s dependence on foreign oil, minimize carbon footprints, and improve air and water quality.

With successful and productive research and education programs across the sciences, engineering, and allied fields, the PETB will bring together disciplines often separated on university campuses. The shared common space provided by this new building will foster the synergy needed to drive innovation and find new solutions to complex problems that can be transferred to industry for commercialization.

The PETB is constructed using renewable materials and technologies developed at WSU, including wood composites, recycled concrete, and pervious pavement. The PETB also incorporates water capture and re-use, heat recovery, individual control of air quality factors, maximized daylighting, optimal siting and incorporation into its landscape, along with numerous other features that will make it the “greenest” building built to date in the WSU Pullman campus.

The PETB is designed to be a technological showcase and model for minimizing the carbon footprint of the built environment. More importantly to those who work and study there, the PETB is a comfortable, high-quality place to collaborate on the next generation of breakthroughs that will keep the state of Washington’s economy thriving in the 21st century.

Completion date: 2016

LeEco Partnered with Compal Electronics for Smartphone Manufacturing

After Xiaomi, Vivo and Gionee, another Chinese company is setting up shop in India.

LeEco, a Chinese internet ecosystem company, has partnered with Taiwan's Compal Electronics to open a smartphone manufacturing facility in Greater Noida with an initial investment of ₹33.53 crore ($5 million), with an additional ₹13.41 crore ($2 million) earmarked for the automation process, local media outlets have reported.

Spread over an area of more than 193,680 sq. ft. (18,000 square meters), the facility will start assembling 60,000 Le 2 smartphone units on a monthly basis. By the end of December, LeEco expects the facility to ramp up its capacity to 200,000.

"We have a strong R&D team in India and plan to add over 1,000 engineers to it by the next year, which we intend to leverage for designing and developing products that resonate even better with our users here and also in overseas markets," said Tin Mok, Vice President of Le Holdings and CEO of LeEco Asia Pacific, according to The Hindu Business Line.

The company said the facility will provide jobs to at least 200 skilled professionals.

This will be Compal's first step in India. The contract manufacturer, which makes more than half of LeEco's mobile phones, also has presence in Poland, Mexico, Brazil and China.

One of the factors that lured LeEco into setting up a facility was the manufacturing incentives the government offers under its Make in India program.

"LeEco believes it’s the perfect time to begin our manufacturing operations in India especially with a new tax system in place. The Goods and Services Tax (GST) will trigger a paradigm shift in the manufacturing sector in India and bring in growth and business opportunities to the country. The GST will also ease the traditional bottlenecks such as production costs, production time, supply chain, logistics and much more," LeEco said in a statement.

LeEco joins the 37 mobile manufacturing companies that have made an investment on India in the last year alone, including China's Gionee and Xiaomi as well as domestic companies like Karbonn, Lava, Micromax, Intex, Jivi, iTel and MTech.

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