Seagate Technology to lay off 2,000 employees in Singapore

SINGAPORE’S already hard-hit electronics manufacturing sector was dealt another blow on Tuesday when hard disk maker Seagate announced that it will close down its Ang Mo Kio hard disk plant by the end of next year and lay off 2,000 workers.

In an statement to the media, Seagate Technology said it will ‘relocate its hard disk manufacturing operations from the Ang Mo Kio facility in Singapore to other existing Seagate sites’.

Retrenched workers will get severance benefits, details of which are confidential, said a Seagate spokesman. She added that some of the affected workers will be offered work at its other sites here. ‘This consolidation is necessary in order for Seagate to further increase efficiency and reduce costs by leveraging investments across fewer manufacturing sites,’ Seagate said in the statement.

The Seagate spokesman said that 2,000 workers at the one million sq foot plant at Ang Mo Kio Ave 5 would lose their jobs. The company has more than 8,000 staff here. In February, it retrenched an undisclosed number of workers.

Then, it gave retrenched workers with more than a year’s service one month’s pay for every year with the company; staff with shorter periods of service were given two weeks of pay.

The announcement marks the end of an era for both Singapore and Seagate. Singapore was once the world’s biggest hard disk manufacturing site, a place where companies like Seagate and now-defunct rivals Micropolis, Conner Peripherals and Stormedia churned out more than half of the world’s hard disks every month.

And Seagate was at the forefront of this, being the first hard disk company to begin assembling hard disks here in 1982. With Seagate’s exit, only one hard disk maker, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, remains.

A Seagate technician, who would only give his name as Cheong, told the Straits Times that he and his colleagues got the bad news at a meeting earlier on Tuesday.

The world’s biggest hard disk maker is not exiting Singapore totally though.

Singapore, said Seagate, ‘will remain a key strategic partner for Seagate, with a focus on high value activities, and Seagate will continue to make strategic investments here.’ The company has a disk media plant in Woodlands producing the silvery platters inside hard disks on which electronic data is stored, as well as a research and development centre off Science Park.

In the first three months of the year, more than 10,000 workers have been laid off. Just last week, Government leaders and unionists warned that many manufacturing jobs will not return even if the economy recovers, as many manufacturers are shifting production to cheaper locales like China and Malaysia.