Both foreign and Chinese media had reported Wednesday that Jia-Bin Duh, president of Cisco Systems (China) Networking Technology Co., had said 40 percent of Cisco's outsourced manufacturing would be done in China by the end of next year.

However, officials of Cisco Systems Inc. later disputed the news reports that said the network appliance company planned to put its outsourced manufacturing into Chinese plants.

A spokeswoman said Cisco's Chinese operations had not gone up or down appreciably and "typically Cisco doesn't project" where it plans to grow its operations.

According to the previous reports, Duh said Cisco spent 25 percent or US$5 billion of its outsourcing budget last year in China.

"It's in the low 20s," the spokeswoman said. Another corporate spokesman said the figures in the news stories were accurate but he was unfamiliar with the context in which they were made.

"Cisco uses a geographically balanced outsourced business model for manufacturing production," the company said in a written statement. Over 90 percent of all Cisco products were made by other companies, the spokeswoman said.

"Cisco expects China to continue to be an important part of the assembly and component supply base," the company's statement said.

China has the world's biggest mobile phone market, with some 350 million users, and is one of Cisco's top five countries for revenue, together with the United States, Japan, Britain and Germany.

Source: Shenzhen Daily