Richardson's international business history goes back at least to the 1980's, when U.S. telecom markets were deregulated, and the world beat a path to the Telecom Corridor® area. Nortel came from Canada, Ericsson from Sweden, and Alcatel from France. Later, Japan's Fujitsu established its telecom arm in Richardson, as did Samsung from Korea and ZTE from China. Most recently, Japan's Hitachi moved a telecom unit to the City after acquiring a license for long-term evolution technology from Nortel. In the IT space, Israel's Amdocs has a major Richardson presence due to its business relationship with Richardson's largest employer, AT&T. The following are some other international companies that have or have had a presence in Richardson and engage in a wide array of businesses.
AccreTech/Tokyo Seimetsu (Japan) - manufacturer of precision measuring and semiconductor manufacturing equipment
Air System Components/Tomkins PLC (UK) - manufacturer of air distribution products for commercial, industrial and residential applications
AppTrigger/Metaswitch (UK) - a service broker that provides ways to deploy and manage applications in any carrier network
Assa Abloy (Sweden) - provides electronic locks and electronic locking systems to the hospitality industry
ASML (Netherlands) - provider of lithography systems for the semiconductor industry
Anritsu (Japan) - provides test and measurement instruments for communications
Cambridge Silicon Radio (UK) - designs and manufactures single-chip radio devices for the Bluetooth standard
Eltek Valere (Finland) - global supplier of energy conversion solutions within telecom, renewable energy, electric vehicles and industrial applications
NanoFactory (Sweden) - develops nanotechnology tools for manipulations, measurement and imaging on the atomic scale
IEX (Israel) - software supports call center forecasting and scheduling methodology