Bell Laboratories will open a research and development center in Seoul, South Korea, next year.

Located in Sangam-dong, 7 kilometers outside downtown Seoul, the new center will employ about 20 to 25 people, according to Korean news reports, and receive perhaps $5.2 million in annual investment from Bell Labs, the research and development arm of Lucent Technologies. (Lucent has not confirmed that investment figure.)

Though Lucent’s corporate headquarters will shift to Paris as it merges with Alcatel, the combined entity will retain Bell Labs’ current New Jersey facilities as a global R&D base. That location will also serve as the merged company’s North American operations base.

Bell Labs, which today employs about 9,000 people, opened its first non-U.S. research center in China in 2000. In 2004, it added centers in Bangalore, India and Blanchardstown, Ireland (near Dublin).

Seoul has earned a reputation for telecom innovation, with high broadband penetration rates and lower broadband costs per bit than the United States.

Jeong Kim, the longtime Lucent employee who was named president of Bell Labs last year, emigrated from Korea to the U.S. in 1975.