Within the next year, the US-based router giant will invest almost US$4 billion on research and development, mainly in its five research centers worldwide, including the Shanghai operation.

Cisco plans to double staff to 500 at the local center by the middle of next year,

In the future, Cisco's Shanghai center, founded in 2005 with an investment of US$32 million, will hire more than 1,000 engineers, about 10 percent of the company's global total for researchers, said Charles Giancarlo, Cisco's chief development officer, without providing a specific timetable.

Cisco's local center is now working on new technologies, from voice over Internet protocol to IPTV and network DVD devices that play computer-stored videos on TV screens through wireless connections.

"We have strong technologies for Internet protocol," Giancarlo said in an interview at the center.

Cisco will launch a new marketing campaign next month to target end users, including changing its logo, Giancarlo said, declining to elaborate.

"The competition in the enterprise router market is heated, and Cisco, though still No. 1, is losing market share to rivals in China," said Zhang Tao, an analyst at Beijing-based CCID Consulting, a research firm under the Ministry of Information Industry.

As such, Cisco is forced to find other business opportunities, such as the promising consumer market, Zhang said.

"The key point (in assessing the consumer sector) is price, and Cisco has to cut costs on management and talent," Zhang said.

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