Nokia and Microsoft both announced new ventures in India on Wednesday, underscoring the country's increasing allure for high-technology companies.

Nokia, the world's biggest mobile phone maker, plans to spend as much as $150 million on a new mobile phone manufacturing plant in India to reduce costs and to cash in on increasing demand in the country.

The facility will employ about 2,000 workers after it is completed over the next four years, Nokia said. The Finnish company currently has nine plants in countries including Hungary, Finland and China.

Nokia, Microsoft and other high-technology companies are betting that demand in countries like India, China and Brazil will lift sales as European and American markets near saturation.

Microsoft, the world's largest software maker, said Wednesday that it would open a research lab in Bangalore, India, in January to increase its presence in the market and take advantage of the country's large and increasingly sophisticated population of engineers.

The lab is Microsoft's sixth and its third outside the United States. The company, which also has labs in Beijing and Cambridge, England, said it planned to employ two dozen scientists, interns and support staff.

Microsoft's chief executive, Steve Ballmer, said two weeks ago that the company may hire "hundreds" of workers in the next year for a new development center in Hyderabad, another Indian technology hub. Microsoft is taking advantage of India's low average wages for technology workers. It has been locating its customer service and software-testing capabilities outside core markets.

The lab will work with Indian universities and conduct research in areas like multilingual systems and technology for emerging markets. It will be run by P. Anandan, a seven-year veteran of Microsoft Research and an expert in computer vision and video analysis.

India will have as many as 184,347 engineering graduates this year, according to the country's National Association of Software & Service Companies.

While Microsoft is tapping into India's scientists and engineers, Nokia is targeting its rapidly growing phone market.

"India's position at the heart of a rapidly growing mobile communications region" makes it an attractive location for a new plant, Nokia said. "Mobile communications become increasingly affordable and available to more people in this diverse region."

Manufacturing will begin in late 2005 or early 2006, the president of Nokia, Pekka Ala-Pietila, said.

India is the world's fastest-growing telecommunications market, with companies like Reliance Infocomm, the country's biggest mobile-phone services company expanding networks and cutting call rates.