MOTOROLA hopes an up-turn in the telecoms market could see jobs returning to Swindon but not until 2004.

The Swindon based firm is hoping the third genera-tion of mobile phone tech-nology, 3G, will lead to a resurgence in the sector.

On Saturday, the company announced plans to reduce the workforce at Swindon sites from 1,337 to 937.

It has now started three months of detailed consulta-tion with staff to see how the redundancies will fall.

Head of communications Patrick Hamilton said: "The telecoms sector worldwide has suffered a serious down-turn and the area having the worst time is western Europe.

"The part of the industry that's suffering the most is the infrastructure which is unfortunately what Moto-rola does in Swindon.

"We hope these will be the last job cuts for a while and remain committed to our operations in Swindon.

"I believe there will be an upturn possibly in 2004. We can't make any guaran-tees but we hope we won't be in this position again."

Motorola's Swindon operations are concerned with building the base-stations for mobile telecoms masts. Mr Hamilton said: "We are suffering because opera-tors like One2One, Voda-fone and the others are not ordering more base stations from us. The order books are not as full as we would have liked."

However he is hopeful that the spread of third generation mobile phone technology will lead to an upturn in business.

The new 3G masts and phones will allow faster data transfer to enable phones to transfer images and even video clips.

Mr Hamilton said: "We are currently in a slow per-iod for the telecom market.

"But operators will start to spend more again on developing the 3G net-works."

He said the company is likely to have more details about Swindon job cuts in two or three months when consultation with staff has been completed.