Dataproducts Posts Loss of $13.8 Million in Quarter

Woodland Hills-based Dataproducts said it lost $13.8 million in the second quarter ended Sept. 28 and is closing its Puerto Rico plant, putting about 200 employees there out of work.

Senior Vice President Frank McQuaid said the company will move the Puerto Rican operations to Hong Kong by the end of the year. Dataproducts had assembled printed circuit boards at the factory since 1979.

The loss for the computer printer manufacturer, which comes to 67 cents a share, contrasts with a profit of $5.4 million, or 26 cents a share, in the corresponding period a year ago. Sales in the quarter were $79.9 million, 30% lower than a year earlier.

It was the second consecutive quarterly loss for Dataproducts, which earlier this year closed plants in San Jose and Irvine.

Dataproducts’ second-quarter results include $14 million in accounting adjustments, write-offs and reserve provisions. Of that, $5 million was for such items as severance pay for workers in Puerto Rico, termination of leases there and the moving of equipment to Hong Kong.

Another $5 million of the $14 million in adjustments was related to the company’s decision to revalue its inventory of low-cost printers, McQuaid said. He said prices for those printers are soft, in part because of competition from manufacturers in Japan, meaning their value as inventory has decreased.

Another $2 million, McQuaid said, was related to a decision to cancel a plan to sell printers developed by Envision, a Northern California company.

For the first six months of its fiscal year, Dataproducts lost $31.3 million, contrasted with a profit of $18.6 million in the year-earlier period. Sales fell 29% to $166.2 million.

The company said it had a $120-million backlog of orders at the end of the quarter, down 29% from a year earlier. The company said, however, that the backlog was up $5 million from the beginning of the quarter.