Canadian contract electronics manufacturer Celestica Inc. has taken another 125,000 square feet of space at its Foothill Ranch manufacturing facility and has plans to hire as many as 150 people in the next 12 months.
Toronto-based Celestica last week extended its current lease of 179,000 square feet for another eight years and took up the remaining space at its building on Towne Centre Drive. The company now has the entire building,305,000 feet in all,where it currently employs 400 people.
Celestica is preparing 60,000 square feet of the new space for electronics manufacturing, said Ben Swenson, the site’s general manager. Another 5,000 feet is set to become engineering offices. Swenson said Celestica plans to have the new space ready by the end of this month.
“There’s a strong possibility we will hire up to 150 people or more in the next 12 months,” Swenson said. “The jobs would be across the board,engineering, operations.”
Celestica makes computers, communications gear, set-top boxes and other electronics for other companies. Customers include Cisco Systems Inc., Dell Computer Corp., EMC Corp., Lucent Technologies Inc. Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc.
The Orange County facility’s major customers are Sun Microsystems and Britain’s International Computers Ltd., a provider of grocery store automated checkout systems and restaurant point-of-sale systems. ICL subleases 67,000 square feet of space from Celestica in Foothill Ranch.
As computer and other electronics companies have paired down their own manufacturing operations, contract electronics production has become one of technology’s hottest sectors.
According to market research firm Technology Forecast Inc., the contract manufacturing industry has been growing about 20% per year in the past half-decade and is expected to hit $178 billion in sales worldwide by 2001, up from $140 billion this year.
With sales of $3.7 billion for the first half of the year, Celestica is among the top electronics manufacturing services companies, along with Solectron Corp. of Milpitas, SCI Systems Inc. of Huntsville, Ala., and Singapore’s Flextronics International Ltd.
OC is home to a handful of contract manufacturers, including Santa Ana-based Express Manufacturing Inc. and Anaheim-based DDi Corp.
Celestica sees its growth coming in tandem with that of its customers, Swenson said.
“The market we’re in continues to show significant growth,” he said.
The company entered Orange County in 1996 by buying Design 2 Distribution Ltd. from ICL. D2D had an Irvine manufacturing facility with about 40,000 square feet of space. Celestica moved to Foothill Ranch in 1998, one month after Swenson joined the company from Toshiba America Information Systems Inc. in Irvine. n
