Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung has approved the construction of Samsung Electronics Vietnam (SEV)’s $300 million research and development (R&D) centre in Hanoi’s Hoang Mai district.

The PM asked the Hanoi People’s Committee in collaboration with the relevant agencies to issue an investment certificate for the investor.

The centre will be licensed to operate within 50 years with the exemption from land lease fees.

SEV plans to build a 21-storey building on a three-hectare land plot and employ 2,000 labourers in 2016 and eventually 4,000 in the upcoming years. The total capital volume of $300 million will be disbursed within four years, including $50 million in the 2016-2017 period, $150 million in 2018, and the remaining $100 million in 2019.

Samsung has hired eight storeys of PVI Tower in Hanoi since 2012 for the Samsung Vietnam Mobile Research and Development Centre (SVMC), which has contributed around 10 per cent of software market share used in Samsung's smart phones and tablets globally.

As of now, SVMC has implemented about 360 projects, 40 of which are co-operated by SVMC’s engineers and other countries-based Samsung engineers, while the remaining commercialised software projects belonged to the centre.

SVMC is currently Samsung’s largest research and Development (R&D) centre in the Southeast Asian region. Samsung has built 25 R&D centres worldwide.

In a related news, Apple Inc. was said to have plans to build a $1 billion data centre in Hanoi to serve Apple’s Asia operations and may also feature R&D activities.