Buyouts and restructurings played out during the past year at Orange County’s biggest makers of computer products.
The top 25 computer products companies here cut local workers nearly 4% in the past year to 7,920 people, according to this week’s Business Journal list. The list includes estimates for eight companies.
Last year, the top companies posted flat employment.
Of those that reported, seven cut workers, six added people and four were flat.
No. 22 Irvine’s Netlist Inc. slid seven spots this year.
The maker of memory boards for servers, routers and broadband switching systems has cut its workforce by almost half to 72 people.
A spokesman for Netlist declined to comment for this story. It’s likely that the company has been squeezed by the falling prices of memory chips,the key component of memory boards.
It’s been a tough market for companies that make and buy memory chips,which have seen prices drop 8% in the first quarter and 39% from the same period a year earlier, according to El Segundo-based market tracker iSuppli Corp.
Netlist got hit with a double-whammy in the first quarter. It saw sales of $13 million, down 65% from a year ago, due to the winding down of some custom products that it had been selling for years.
Some of its orders were unfilled due to a shortage of certain parts, Chief Executive Chuck Hong said in a statement. The company swung to a loss of $584,000, down from a profit of $631,000 a year earlier.
Last year the company opened its first overseas plant near Shanghai, China, which employs some 75 workers.
No. 2 Fountain Valley’s Kingston Technology Co. held its spot and was flat at 900 workers.
“Kingston has strived to maintain steady and consistent employment levels,” spokesman David Leong said. “Memory is a commodity business and the one thing about this industry is that it is ever-changing. We try our best to be smart and sensible at all times,avoiding hiring sprees and thus subsequent layoffs should the market go south.”
Earlier in the year, the company created a separate division, called Kingston Digital, to beef up the sales of flash memory devices for consumer electronics and computers. The move didn’t affect headcount, according to Leong.
Few Gainers
No. 1 Lake Forest disk drive maker Western Digital Corp. was one of the few that bucked the overall downward trend.
The company added about 65 workers here for a total of 1,050.
Western Digital’s stock has been on a tear lately,it’s up some 85% in the past six months,on what has been a year of stable supplies and prices for disk drives and big market share gains in drives sold at stores and used in laptop computers.
Some industry watchers worry whether the run for disk drives is over with recent price cuts by Western Digital and others.
No. 4 Toshiba America Information Systems Inc., an Irvine division of Japan’s Toshiba Corp., lost a few local jobs through normal attrition, according to spokesman Michael Bingham.
The company, which designs laptops, storage devices and other office gear locally, saw a 3% dip in the number of workers for a total of 628.
The company is looking at “several strategic hires” in a few new areas, Bingham said.
Unisys Drops
Toshiba swapped places with No. 5 Mission Viejo’s Unisys Corp., a unit of the Blue Bell, Pa.-based tech consulting company and server maker.
Unisys cut some 200 jobs here for a total of 550 as part of an ongoing restructuring. A few years ago the company combined its server group units in north San Diego’s Rancho Bernardo and Mission Viejo.
The move was part of a big shift in focus for the company, which is pushing customers away from big mainframe computers to smaller, powerful servers built around Intel Corp. chips.
Unisys once had a bigger operation in OC, counting as many as 1,300 workers. It ranked as the second largest computer products maker in the county in the mid-1990s.
Irvine’s Linksys, a unit of No. 3 Cisco Systems Inc., upped its number of local workers by 23% to 468.
Cisco’s own local unit saw its number of workers here fall about 1% to 287 workers.
Linksys, which makes up the bulk of Cisco’s operations here, has been pushing sales of its networking gear in emerging markets, according to Chris Dobrec, director of strategy.
“What’s happened in the last five years since the company was acquired by Cisco is that it’s expanded globally and we are gaining more of our revenue overseas,” he said.
The company’s seen growth in Eastern Europe and the Middle East in particular.
“A lot of the oil-rich nations are investing in broadband infrastructure,” Dobrec said.
The company is also going after sales to small businesses through a network of resellers.
Linksys has been hiring “across the board,” Dobrec said. It’s been bringing in engineers and software developers to work on software designed to make its networking products easier to use, he said.
It recently inked a deal with T-Mobile International AG to market a service that hooks up a user’s cell phone to a home network via a Linksys router.
No. 6 Gateway Inc., the Irvine computer maker, still is being integrated into Taiwan’s Acer Inc. after the company bought Gateway for $750 million last year.
Under Acer, Gateway no longer discloses local worker counts. The Business Journal estimated the company has about 475 workers here.
Former chief executive Ed Coleman stepped down in January and the unit now is run by Acer’s Rudi Schmidleithner, who runs its U.S. operations from San Jose.
No. 10 Irvine-based Quantum Corp., a maker of backup tape systems for networks continued its downward slide.
Quantum counted some 300 workers here, down 33% from a year ago. It moved down three spots on the decline.
The company closed its Costa Mesa plant early last year and moved about 70 jobs to another campus in Colorado Springs, Colo.
Additional cuts came this year due to “other functions no longer being needed due to a partnership” with another company, spokesman Brad Cohen said.
No. 12 Irvine’s Printronix Inc., a maker of industrial printers for manufacturers and retailers, is still reorganizing after being bought by private equity firm Vector Capital.
The company fell two spots on the list and posted a 14% decline to 293 workers.
