"Russia is the second country in the world after the United States by the number of specialists working on software programs", said John Kim, general director of the Samsung Software Center.
Kim said sales of software products should far outpace the cost of running the center and paying Russian programmers. "We expect our profit to be many, many times more then we have invested", he said.
Samsung has so far invested $15, 000 in the project, which will employ 15 Russian specialists by the end of the year. Kim plans to hire 40 programmers by 1995 and 300 by 1996.
Kim said the center will initially pay Russian programmers up to 1 million rubles ($812) a month, a bargain compared to what specialists fetch in the West. Programmers at the Russian Academy of Sciences, where the center expects to hire most of its employees, make from 50, 000 to 100, 000 rubles a month.
Russian specialists, whose knowledge in the past was used for military and space matters, will be trained in Russia and in South Korea to tailor their expertise toward designing commercial software. The center will produce MS-DOS, Unix and multimedia software.
Kim said Samsung will open more software centers in Moscow depending on the success of the first.
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