An emerging unit of Fujitsu Ltd. has moved to new headquarters here and shifted its manufacturing operation to upstate New York as part of a consolidation of its U.S. operations.
Fujitsu Frontech North America’s new office takes 30,000 square feet at 27121 Towne Centre Drive in Foothill Ranch. The move shed about 170,000 square feet compared with its previous location, which was just down the street and included large areas for warehousing and manufacturing.
It’s the second move in the past year for Fujitsu Frontech, which shifted its headquarters from Dallas to Foothill Ranch in 2011 to realign U.S. operations and draw from the region’s strong talent base of engineers and programmers, according to President Yoshi Masuda.
The latest consolidation moves also included relocating hardware and engineering operations from San Diego to Orange County. That helped offset a loss of about 40 manufacturing workers locally when those operations were moved to New York.
Fujitsu Frontech has about 100 employees here, including management and a development and engineering lab.
The headquarters operation oversees the marketing of technologies from Japan to banks, hospitals, grocery stores and big-box retailers in the U.S. The products include ATMs, self-checkout equipment, image recognition devices, digital inventory trackers, medical and movie-theater ticket kiosks, and other point-of-sale machines.
Fujitsu Frontech has about 500 retail customers, including Cincinnati-based Kroger Co., which runs Ralph’s locally, Pleasanton-based Safeway Inc., which operates as Von’s here, and Godiva Chocolate Inc. in New York, among others. Annual sales are between $100 million and $150 million, according to Masuda.
Its Tokyo-based parent, Fujitsu Frontech Ltd., has annual sales of about $1.2 billion and employs more than 1,800 workers. Both count Fujitsu Ltd., a diversified electronics product maker with annual sales of $50 billion, as an ultimate parent.
Fujitsu Frontech was established in 2009 from remnants of Fujitsu Computer Products America and
Fujitsu Transaction Services, which established a warehouse and manufacturing operation in Lake Forest in the late 1990s.
The combined unit aims to add cloud-computing services to its repertoire, eyeing a growing market fueled by surging demand for memory storage with the proliferation of streaming data.
“We thought we should focus on the cloud type of business,” Masuda said. “We act as primary beneficiaries to include and launch these technologies in the North America market.”
Fujitsu was at the forefront of advancing the self-checkout phenomenon at retailers across the U.S. nearly a decade ago. In 2004 its Frisco, Texas-based unit Fujitsu Transaction Solutions acquired the self-checkout business of Optimal Robotics in Montreal for $35 million in cash.
Plattsburgh
Fujitsu Frontech’s consolidation began in late 2010 as light manufacturing at its plant in Plattsburgh, N.Y., expanded. That location became the company’s manufacturing hub for North America, which prompted the Foothill Ranch operation to move it manufacturing and warehousing there late last year.
The Plattsburgh operation employs about 75 people.
Plattsburgh, located in northeastern New York state, also is close to Fujitsu Frontech’s software development office in Montreal, which employs about 80 people.
