Motorola's Pacific region vice-president and general manager, Ron Nissen, said from Sydney yesterday that Christchurch was one of three or four now on its list for the centre. The other New Zealand candidate is Auckland. Wellington and Dunedin have been ruled out, as have all smaller centres. Motorola executives have been to the University of Canterbury and will revisit it in the next few months. They will also meet community leaders.
Graduate supply is the key to locating the site.
The world is short of hundreds of thousands of software and electrical engineering graduates. There was no direct link between Motorola's contention to supply Telecom's new CDMA cellphone network and the research site, he said. The centre would initially be only a little bigger than Trimble Navigation New Zealand in Christchurch, a research and development arm of Silicon Valley's Trimble Navigation, the GPS navigation corporation. Trimble employs about 180 people in Christchurch. One of the city's attractions for Motorola is the the number of technology companies.