[Techtaffy Newsdesk]

Huawei will invest €70 million (roughly $90 million) over a five-year period to establish a research and development (R&D) center in Helsinki, Finland.

The Finnish R&D center will be a key driver in Huawei’s research and development of new technologies for mobile devices. Initial projects will focus on software development for smartphones, tablets and rich-media devices, optimizing the user experience of existing operating systems such as Android and Windows Phone 8. From the outset, Huawei plans to recruit 30 employees for the center, with the goal of hiring more than 100 employees over five years.

Over the past 10 years, Huawei has grown significantly in Europe, particularly due to the region’s open economy and foreign investment initiatives. In September 2012, Huawei announced a $2 billion investment in R&D, local procurement and center of excellence initiatives in the United Kingdom. Huawei currently employs more than 7,000 people across Europe.

The R&D center in Helsinki will serve as one of Huawei’s core centers for device R&D, joining an already established modem and technology design center in Sweden and a user interface research center in the United Kingdom.