Sanmina-SCI Shutters Irvine Facility, Shifts Workers to Costa Mesa
By ANDREW SIMONS
San Jose-based Sanmina-SCI Corp. has closed its 400-person Irvine plant and shifted most of the workers to Costa Mesa as part of a consolidation resulting from Sanmina Corp.’s December buy of SCI Systems Inc.
“We closed that plant a couple of months ago,” said George Dudnikov, vice president of development and strategic marketing at Sanmina-SCI, a contract electronics maker.
Analysts had expected Sanmina-SCI to close the Irvine facility and merge it with its newer, 100,000-square-foot Costa Mesa plant, which Sanmina opened a year ago. Huntsville, Ala.-based SCI didn’t have any operations in Orange County.
The Costa Mesa building, which has features similar to a semiconductor fabrication plant, houses Sanmina-SCI’s advanced interconnect manufacturing group, which previously was based in Irvine.
Acquired from Honeywell International Inc., the Costa Mesa facility stands to give Sanmina-SCI the ability to design products and carry them to volume production. It’s also double the size of the Irvine plant,a factor the company probably considered when planning what to do with it.
Even though the SCI acquisition gave Sanmina a huge jump in manufacturing capacity, the company has indicated it won’t move out of OC altogether because of the highly skilled workforce here.
“We like being in Orange County a lot,” said Sanmina’s Costa Mesa plant manager Jim Ryan in an interview last year. “We like the visibility and the labor market here.”
Sanmina’s acquisition of SCI created one of the largest contract manufacturers, making gear for big names such as Nortel Networks Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc. Milpitas-based Solectron Corp. is the largest contract electronics maker.
The deal came as Sanmina’s business has slowed dramatically since last year, primarily due to the falloff in the telecommunications industry. In the fourth quarter, Sanmina-SCI’s sales were cut nearly in half to $2.4 billion.
