The company is building a new research and development centre in Noida on a three-acre plot with an investment of $10 million. The rest of the funds will be used in developing human resource and IT infrastructure. The first phase of the building, which is slated to be completed by June 2002, will be able to accommodate around 300 software engineers. The second phase will absorb an additional 500 engineers.

Addressing mediapersons here on Tuesday, president and chief executive officer of Adobe Bruce Chizen said that Indian development centre is currently the third largest centre of Adobe in the world and is engaged in development of crucial products of Adobe such as Acrobat Reader for PDAs and image and video compression. India operations contribute around 17 per cent of total development work of Adobe, he added.

"The expansion plan is an acknowledgement of Indian operations' importance and achievements. We are pleased with Adobe's expanding presence in India and believe that the increased investment in the region illustrates our commitment to this part of the world," said Mr Chizen.

Adobe has an R&D centre with a strength of more than 90 engineering staff. The company plans to double it by the end of this year. The existing facilities will be shifted to the new building after the first phase of completion.

Adobe to invest $50 million Talking about the market of Adobe products in India, Mr Chizen said that Indian market is right now very small as far as the Adobe product sale is concerned. But the company plans to increase the revenue contribution from India to 5 per cent by 2006 as the country offers tremendous opportunities and market, he added.

"Piracy is the biggest challenge for us in the Indian market. Around 90 per cent of the Adobe products being used in India are pirated, said Mr Chizen indicating that the piracy problem has slowed down the interest of the company in India to develop it as a market with localised products in regional languages. "We are not confident of recovering the investment in developing Indian language products because of piracy," he said.

Adobe has also launched an e-book initiative in India to popularise the product and its usages among people. The company has roped in the Indian writer and actress, Ms Tara Despande, to write a collaborative e-novel with participation from public. Ms Despande will write the first chapter of the novel which will be made available on its exclusive site named themotive.net and participation will be sought from readers to write the next chapter.

The contributed chapters will be read and the best will be selected by Ms Despande. The novel, which is based on a murder mystery of a politician in Mumbai, will have seven chapters and the chapters 2, 4 and 6 will be taken as contribution and rest including the last chapter will be written by Ms Despande. The selected contributors will be given the credit in the novel.