Multi-Fineline Electronix Inc., a maker of flexible printed circuit boards for cell phones and other mobile devices, plans to sell its longtime Anaheim headquarters and relocate elsewhere in Orange County.
The company, also called M-Flex, operates out of a 105,000-square-foot industrial building at 3140 E. Coronado St. in Anaheim’s Canyon business district.
It’s been based in Anaheim since it started in 1984.
M-Flex is expected to put the Coronado Street building up for sale later this year. It expects to move to smaller quarters sometime next year, according to a company spokesperson.
The company is eyeing locations as far south as Irvine, according to the M-Flex spokesperson.
The relocation plans come as M-Flex puts a bigger emphasis on its growing operations in China.
In June, the company opened two plants there; a circuit board plant in Suzhou, near Shanghai; and an assembly facility for finished circuit boards in Chengdu.
The two facilities have a combined 900,000 square feet of space.
The added production should boost M-Flex’s annual capacity to $1.1 billion to $1.2 billion worth of production for the 12 months through September, and to $1.3 billion by early 2012, Chief Executive Reza Meshgin said at the time the two buildings opened.
M-Flex had $867 million in sales for the 12 months through June. It ranked as OC’s 43rd fastest-growing public company, with a two-year sales growth rate of 11.4%, according to the Business Journal’s latest ranking, published earlier this month.
The company’s circuit boards are used in cell phones, smart phones and other mobile devices.
Customers
M-Flex doesn’t disclose customers. Apple Inc. in Cupertino and Canada-based Research in Motion Ltd., the maker of BlackBerry, are known to use the company’s circuit boards.
The circuit boards are flexible, which makes them easier to design into phones, barcode scanners and other devices.
Rivals include Singapore-based Flextronics International Ltd., Young Poong Electronics Co. in South Korea, and Foxconn Electronics Inc. in Taiwan, among others.
M-Flex is part of Singapore’s WBL Corp., a holding company that operates technology and other businesses.
WBL owns 62% of M-Flex’s publicly traded shares and a third of the company’s voting stock.
M-Flex went public in 2004.
The decision to sell its Anaheim headquarters is the latest chapter in a multi-year shift of M-Flex production to China.
The company once produced much of its circuit boards at its Anaheim headquarters, which still does prototypes and more complex jobs.
Work in China
M-Flex has about 80 workers in Anaheim, down from 500 in 2006. It opened its first China plant in the mid-1990s and opened another there in 2003.
The company now employs about 16,000 people, with a bulk of those workers in China.
It is in the early stages of finding a new location to hold its OC operations.
M-Flex is looking for a “collaborative workspace” and some office space in OC, rather than an industrial building in the mold of its current headquarters, a company spokesperson said last week.
The Coronado Street building—a few blocks from a former Boeing Corp. office site that’s being turned into a new campus for Eastside Christian Church in Fullerton—is likely to sell for a little less than $10 million, based on comparable industrial sales of late.
It was built in 1973, and had an assessed value of about $8 million as of last year, according to CoStar Group Inc. records.
M-Flex said in a regulatory filing earlier this month that it will be taking a $1.5 million impairment charge for the quarter that ended in September related to the decision to sell the building.
There’s a chance M-Flex will remain in Anaheim.
The departure of other industrial companies from the Anaheim Canyon district—which runs along the 91 (Riverside) Freeway in the eastern portion of the city, and once was a center of defense and aerospace contractors—has prompted city officials to spend $355,000 to develop a new identity for the 2,500-acre area.
