SAP to expand in China, eastern Europe
(Reuters)
Updated: 2006-01-30 09:29

German software maker SAP plans to significantly expand development capacities in China and eastern Europe as a result of increasing costs in India, its chief executive was quoted as saying in a newspaper.

"India is starting to get expensive," Henning Kagermann told the Financial Times Deutschland. "We've decided to hire only a certain number of employees there and then to look around for other locations."

"One reason we don't have so much development in China is obviously that protection of intellectual property is not like in other countries," Kagermann added, but said that this would not stop SAP from doing more in the country.

He said that the number of employees SAP had working in development in China was in the low hundreds, but could easily rise to the thousands depending on the changing environment.

SAP is the world's biggest maker of business software.