Satyam Computer, India's fourth-biggest information technology services company, will invest about US$60 million by 2008 in China to increase staff tenfold and expand its reach to more cities, Satyam China's chief said in an interview yesterday.

Satyam is the latest Indian-based IT service firm to announce expansion in China, following Tata Constancy Service and Infosys.

Satyam plans to hire 3,000 people in China by the end of 2008 compared with about 300 at present. Eighty percent of the new staff will be based in second- or third-tier cities, Raghvendra Tripathi, Satyam China's chief, told Shanghai Daily.

"We will carry out some moves like Shanghai to Hangzhou to avoid wage hikes," said Tripathi, who expects Satyam's China revenue to double to US$10 million in the next fiscal year, which ends on March 31, 2007.

Satyam now has research centers in Dalian, Shanghai and a newly opened facility in Guangzhou.

Satyam, whose revenue surpassed US$1 billion in the last fiscal year, is one of India's big-four IT outsourcing companies along with TCS, Infosys and Wipro.

No. 2 Infosys said it will hire as many as 10,000 people in China in the next three years. TCS has signed agreements with Microsoft and three Chinese firms to set up a software joint venture.

Indian firms are flooding into China to take advantage of its comparatively low labor costs.

Average salaries in India are forecast to rise more than 11 percent this year.

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