The California-based company will undertake its recruitment drive in Singapore over the next two years as it seeks to expand its higher-skilled operations in the city-state, the Straits Times reported.

Seagate's general manager for Asian operations, James Chirico, told the newspaper the company wanted to tap into Singapore's pool of engineering talent to design, produce, pilot-test and assemble new products.

Mass production of the products will then most likely be done in China.

"This means Singapore will have a part to play in all the products Seagate offers today," Chirco told the newspaper from Wuxi in China.

"We are hiring more (people) to meet increased production here (in China), and to fill newly created positions as part of our push into consumer electronics."

Seagate slashed its workforce in Singapore from 22,000 in the late 1990s to 8,500 currently as it moved operations to lower-cost countries but it remains one of the city-state's biggest employers.

Singapore has been forced to restructure its economy over recent years to cope with the widespread trend of companies moving low-cost manufacturing jobs to China and other countries with cheaper labour costs.

The government has adopted a dual approach of trying to lower labour costs while creating high-end industries in manufacturing and other sectors.

For example, more than 50 multi-national companies are now established in Singapore's biomedical research centre, Biopolis.

All rights reserved. copyright 2018 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.