APW Ltd. is laying off nearly 70 workers in Anaheim and closing one of two plants in an area targeted for redevelopment as homes.
The company, headquartered in Bermuda with its U.S. base in Wisconsin, is shuttering its 212,000-square-foot site at 525 E. South St. and consolidating at its other Anaheim facility at 2100 E. Orangewood Ave., said David Hammer, director of marketing at APW.
The remaining site for APW, which makes enclosures for electronics gear, is about 130,000 square feet.
The layoffs are set to conclude by month’s end, according to filings APW made with the state’s Employment Development De-
partment.
The moves come after the company stopped making some products and had to shut down production lines, Hammer said. The discontinued products were for two customers, he said, declining to identify them.
“A decision was made to discontinue making certain types of products, due to profitability of the products,” Hammer said.
At the same time, APW’s landlord on South Street in downtown Anaheim wanted to free up the space for homes planned for the area.
“The combination of having to consolidate the site and discontinuing a couple of different assembly lines resulted in the layoffs,” Hammer said.
Anaheim and Del Mar-based Brookfield Homes Corp. are in talks with APW’s landlord,a Hawaiian pension fund,to buy the land, said Lisa Stipkovich, executive director of community development for the city.
The 18 acres or so are part of a 40-acre stretch of commercial space that’s set to be turned into homes and apartments, some affordable, she said.
The APW site is directly south of the former campus of lock maker Kwikset, now part of Black & Decker Corp.’s hardware and home improvement group in Lake Forest. The campus covers more than 15 acres and is part of the redevelopment.
A few smaller sites still need to be acquired, Stipkovich said.
Construction could start next year on the 40-acre site and finish in two to three years.
Now a gritty industrial area, the site is set to have a park and apartments and condominiums with multiple bedrooms for families. Affordable and market-rate homes are planned, she said.
“The area is part of an older industrial area that really is now incompatible with the residential area that surrounds it,” Stipkovich said.
The development is an effort to combat Anaheim’s housing shortage, said Sheri Vander Dussen, the city’s planning director. Anaheim hasn’t added enough housing to keep up with population growth in the past several years, she said.
“There’s an incredible demand for housing in Anaheim,” Vander Dussen said.
The city plans to buy about half of the APW site with Brookfield buying the other half, according to Stipkovich. In the next few years, the city plans to gradually sell off its property for redevelopment by Brookfield, she said.
APW is set to move out of the South Street site by March.
The company’s other Anaheim site is about a mile to the south.
In Anaheim, APW does electrical and mechanical assembly, sheet metal fabrication, plastic injection and assembles circuit boards, according to the company’s Web site.
APW also has a sales office in Anaheim for its plastics and enclosures businesses.
And change isn’t only coming in Anaheim for APW, which emerged from bankruptcy reorganization in 2002.
The company in May announced a plan to realign itself around its enclosures for electronic cabinets, security cameras and air conditioners.
It also said it would focus on “selected” custom enclosures for telecommunications, chip equipment and medical products.
APW has tapped Rothschild Inc. to help it evaluate possible sales of some operations.
