Microsoft Corp. plans to set up a regional software engineering center in Poland this year as part of an effort to increase investment in the ex-communist country, Chairman Bill Gates said Thursday.
Gates said he hoped to have more than 40 people working by the end of 2006 at the center, which he said would "draw on ... talent that is very strong here."
The center would be based in Warsaw and was expected to eventually employee about 200 people, meaning it could grow to become one of the company's major programming centers worldwide, Microsoft official Tomasz Bochenek said.
Bochenek refused to say how much money Microsoft was investing in the center.
Such high-tech bases, which employ highly-skilled workers, are badly needed in Poland, which has a jobless rate of 17 percent and regularly sees its most educated workers leave the country for higher salaries in Western Europe and the United States.
"From the perspective of a country like Poland, this is a big thing," said Bochenek, Microsoft's manager of sales and marketing for central and eastern Europe.
During a brief address to reporters in Warsaw, Gates also said Microsoft would set up five training centers in Poland as part of ongoing efforts to promote education worldwide.
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