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Sanmina to close Dublin facility
Friday, January 04 2002
by Sheila McDonald


Up to 130 Dublin jobs are at risk as the contract electronics manufacturer
Sanmina seeks to close its Blanchardstown facility and relocate operations to
Cork.

The consolidation was not unexpected following Sanmina's acquisition last year of
SCI, another major company in the USD100 billion contract manufacturing sector. 



The company, now known as Sanmina-SCI, is involved in the creation and assembly
of printed circuit boards as well as cable systems and enclosures for
telecommunications equipment and networking systems.



The combined company employs more than 735 people in Ireland, including 600 in
Fermoy, Co. Cork and 133 in its Blanchardstown assembly plant and its Limerick
customer services facility. It is not known whether the consolidation will affect
the Limerick facility. 



Operations from the Blanchardstown plant are to be relocated to the facility in
Fermoy. Some staff from Dublin will be given the option of transferring to Cork
or to one of the 100 other global facilities in the Samina-SCI group, but the
majority of jobs are expected to go.



Seamus Grady, vice president and general manager of the Dublin facility, said the
similarity of the operations in Dublin and Cork and the current business climate
left the company with no alternative but consolidation. The company is known to
have received grants from the IDA which will be transferred to the Cork operation
and therefore will not have to be repaid despite the closure of its Dublin
facility





Over the past year Sanmina has been on the acquisition trail, including its
purchase last October of assets of the Northern Ireland subsidiaries of
E-M-Solutions, an enclosure manufacturer. But the company has felt the squeeze of
the downturn as its clients are focussed in the telecommunications, data
networking and high end computing industries. Rival contract manufacturers,
including Flextronics and Celestica, have also suffered and together cut some 500
jobs from their Irish operations last year.



Shareholders approved Sanmina's purchase of SCI in December, one of the largest
mergers in a depressed year for the technology industry. Under the terms of the
merger, SCI stockholders received 1.36 shares of Sanmina common stock for each
share of SCI common stock. 



The value of the deal tumbled from USD6 billion to USD4.9 billion purchase when
completed due to the fall in the companies' share prices.  But the companies
also revealed in December that the merger would generate some USD200 million in
savings in the first year alone, around USD50 million more than first estimated.