Toshiba to Triple Its Irvine Work Force in the Next 2 Years
Toshiba America Information Systems Inc. has accelerated its year-old expansion in Orange County because of brisk demand for its products and expects to nearly triple its local employment--to 2,400 people--by March, 1992, according to the company’s president.
Kiichi Hataya, president of TAIS, a U.S. subsidiary of Tokyo-based Toshiba Corp., said in an interview the company expects to employ 3,000 people throughout its U.S. operations by early 1992, up sharply from earlier estimates of 2,200 by that date. The unit’s current U.S. employment is 1,560 people.
The revised estimate is based on current growth expectations, Hataya said. The company currently employs 879 people at its Irvine manufacturing operation, which produces laptop computers, business telephones, facsimile machines, office copiers and cellular phones.
This week the company began making printed circuit boards for its popular laptop computer line in a new, $9-million plant within its sprawling headquarters complex in the Irvine Spectrum business park. Employment at the circuit board plant will grow from 75 to 220 by March, 1992.
Hataya said the expansion is due to acceptance of Toshiba’s products as well as the Japanese parent firm’s long-term strategy to shift manufacturing of products sold in the U.S. market from Japan to the United States.
Hataya also said the company plans to manufacture a new lightweight “laptop-type engineering workstation,” introduced earlier this week by parent company Toshiba Corp. in Tokyo.
The new machine will hit the Japanese market in July and will probably reach the U.S. market early next year, Hataya said. Toshiba will manufacture the machine in Irvine.
The 17-pound computer--a result of a venture between Toshiba and Sun Microsystems Inc. in Mountain View--is the first laptop model to use a 32-bit Sparc microprocessor based on Sun’s reduced instruction set computing (RISC) architecture.
RISC chips reduce the number of operating instructions a processor needs to crunch data, making it faster than conventional processors.
Bill Lempesis, a computer analyst at Dataquest, a San Jose market research firm, said the laptop workstation focuses on a relatively narrow segment of the laptop market. He estimated Toshiba has a 13.7% share of the $4.1-billion U.S. laptop computer market, which is expected to soar to $22.8 billion by 1994.
Toshiba opened its information systems unit in 1981. Spurred by the threat of a ban on Toshiba imports as a result of trade violations in 1987, as well as the corporation’s strategy to establish manufacturing operations on all major continents, the company has shifted more production to the United States in the past several years.
Within the next two years, Hataya said, U.S. firms will supply up to 60% of the parts for printed circuit boards for Toshiba laptop, compared to about 5% now. The subsidiary reported sales of about $900 million for its fiscal year ended March 31.
