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Plasmon move leads to layoffs: New company plant will be half as big
(Gazette, The (Colorado Springs, CO) (KRT) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) May 10--Plasmon Plc is moving its Colorado Springs plant to smaller quarters as part of a plan to shift some production to a Westminster company.
The company will lay off "a small number" of its 130 employees when it moves in July to a 54,000-squarefoot building in the Inter-Quest business park, but it won't disclose the exact number, said Steven Murphy, Plasmon's Springsbased chief executive.
The British-based company makes optical disk drive libraries that can store between 3 terabytes (3,000 gigabytes) and nearly 1 petabyte (1 million gigabytes) of data for up to 100 years. They sell for between $25,000 and more than $10 million.
Plasmon's lease on 110,000 square feet on Arrowswest Drive near Garden of the Gods Road is expiring and includes much more space than the manufacturing operation is using, said Carol Couch, the company's senior vice president of worldwide operations.
At the same time, Plasmon is outsourcing the early stages of manufacturing to Western Electronics in Westminster and is in discussions with Western about offering jobs at its Westminster plant to workers Plasmon will lay off in the Springs, Couch said.
The Colorado Springs plant will focus on final assembly of the custom-made libraries and testing of the completed device, Couch said. The restructuring, announced in August, will cut by half the time it takes Plasmon to make and deliver the libraries, she said.
"This new facility allows us to align our resources with the market," Murphy said. "We feel that this is a growth move rather than a defensive (cost-cutting) move. It will allow us to support customers better, faster and with improved quality."
The company has signed an eight-year lease for 44,000 square feet in the 54,000-square-foot building now under construction at 9925 Federal Drive, near Interstate 25 and InterQuest Parkway, by Corporate Office Properties Trust. The company has an option to lease the remaining 10,000 square feet.
Plasmon employed about 210 people in the Springs two years ago, but it had several rounds of layoffs as it shifted from making specialized optical disk storage equipment to optical drive libraries for archiving medical, financial, legal and other records.
CONTACT THE WRITER: 636-0234 or wayneh@gazette.com
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Copyright (c) 2008, The Gazette, Colorado Springs, Colo.
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