NEW DELHI: Since the beginning of this year, the FDI projected for India's IT and Telecom sectors has reached a record $9 billion. While telecom will attract $2.5 billion, IT will attract the remaining $6.5 billion, a newspaper said. In the last two months alone, more than $5 billion worth of investments have been announced for India, the Financial Express said. The combined telecom FDI of $2.5 billion is much higher than India's total exports of telecom equipment and services in 2003-04. The biggest investment in the telecom sector came from the Vodafone's decision to buy a 10 percent stake in Bharti Tele Ventures Limited for $1.5 billion. Manufacturing of handsets and networking equipment will attract the rest. The year began with Ericsson announcing a $250 million manufacturing and R&D facility in Jaipur and Chennai in March, this year. In April, Finland based Elcoteq inaugurated its telecom networking equipment manufacturing facility in Bangalore with an investment of $100 million. This was followed by Nokia's announcement of a $200 million handset-manufacturing center in Chennai. In August, Siemens announced a $100 million equipment manufacturing facility. In September, telecom giant Flextronics signed a MoU with India to set up a $100 million hardware manufacturing facility in Chennai. LG has already started its handset manufacturing in Pune while Korean giant Samsung announced its $15 million handset manufacturing facility in Haryana today. The IT sector saw phenomenal growth in FDI in 2005 with $6.5 billion of investment. The total investment in IT bypassed the India's ITeS exports in 2004 ($5.7 billion) and was 48.3 percent of total IT exports.