Santa Ana’s STEC Inc., a maker of flash memory drives for industrial uses, is set to cut some 200 local jobs as it moves work to a new factory it built in Malaysia.
The move caps a long effort by the company to reduce costs by sending some of its operations to a 210,000-square-foot plant in Penang, Malaysia.
The cuts, which represent about a quarter of STEC’s total workers, are set to occur over several stages and are expected to by done by the end of the year, the company said in a regulatory filing.
STEC said it expects to take charges of $1.2 million to $1.7 million for severance pay and related costs.
STEC makes what are known as solid state drives with no moving parts. It sells them to server makers such as Dell Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co. and EMC Corp., among others.
The company first laid out its Malaysia plans back in 2007.
“The Malaysia operation is expected to reduce our overall corporate effective tax rate in the future, reduce incremental engineering and manufacturing labor costs, and extend our reach to customers in the far East,” Chief Executive Manouch Moshayedi said in a past earnings report.
STEC had a recent market value of about $245 million.
