Northrop Will Cut 800 Jobs and Close a Plant : Defense: The Newbury Park facility will be shut down by 1991, and many of its 1,800 workers will be transferred. Three units will be combined.

Northrop Corp. said Wednesday that it would close its Newbury Park plant in Ventura County, eliminate another 800 jobs and consolidate key divisions.

The news wasn’t unexpected. In May, Northrop said it would lay off 3,000 workers and hinted that further cutbacks were possible.

Many of the 1,800 Newbury Park workers will be transferred to the company’s aircraft plant in Hawthorne, where Northrop produces fuselage sections for the Boeing 747 jetliner, among other things.

Northrop said the 28-year-old Newbury Park plant would be closed by 1991, and production of drone aircraft--used for gunnery training by the military--would be moved to Hawthorne.

Lawrence Harris, an aerospace analyst with Bateman Eichler, Hill Richards in Los Angeles, said the shutdown of the Newbury Park plant wasn’t a surprise, especially in light of previously announced cutbacks at the defense contractor, including closing a plant in Anaheim.

“This move has been under study for some time,” he said.

Northrop didn’t say how much it expected to save by consolidating and shrinking its operations. The company said it would eventually sell its Newbury Park plant and the 100 acres of land around it. The plant and property are estimated to be worth $100 million.

The 800 jobs to be cut will come from Northrop’s entire aircraft division, including the Newbury Park facility and other plants, Northrop said. About 400 of those jobs will be eliminated through attrition and retirements, the firm said.

Northrop is streamlining in response to cuts in defense spending and to make its operations more efficient.

With this in mind, the aerospace firm announced Wednesday that it was combining its three separate electronics units into a single new electronics and avionics division to be headed by Wallace C. Solberg, the vice president who currently runs one of the electronics units. Its headquarters will be in Rolling Meadows, Ill.

Separately, a Northrop spokesman said that David N. Ferguson, a high-ranking executive who oversaw the electronics operations and was close to former Chairman Thomas V. Jones, has retired.

Jones retired in September after 27 years with Northrop amid allegations of fraud and bribery. The company is said to be the subject of 12 separate probes, including one that centers on a charge that it paid a $6.25-million bribe to a Korean power broker to sell its F-20 jet fighter to the Korean government.

The consolidation moves are part of an effort by Ken Kresa, Northrop’s new chairman and chief executive, to make the defense manufacturer more efficient in what is shaping up as a hostile environment for defense contractors.

“We are making Northrop a new kind of company for the environment we have ahead of us,” Kresa said in a statment. “We are going to be sized right for the future and, even more important, we are going to be focused right.”

Aerospace analyst Paul H. Nisbet with Prudential-Bache Securities in New York said the electronics consolidation made sense.

“Over the last two or three years, Northrop has moved up rapidly as one of the technical leaders in the business, but management didn’t keep up with that,” Nisbet said. “Since Ken Kresa took over from Jones, he’s been moving to correct that situation and bring up the quality of management, along with the good technology they already have.”

The consolidation may in part be designed to address some recent criticisms of the company’s management structure. A special military review of Northrop’s operations made public last month said the company operates “as a loose federation of autonomous divisions” with little or no management development. One military supervisor said he could not identify a single Northrop program that operated without difficulty.

Northrop said the consolidation of the electronics units--in Hawthorne and Norwood, Mass., wouldn’t affect employment.

One analyst said, however, that the consolidation might in part reflect the loss of business in one of the electronics units. Harris, the Bateman Eichler analyst, said the electronics unit in Hawthorne will lose to Rockwell the contract for an inertial measurement device that is used in the guidance system of the MX missile.

“Perhaps some shrinkage is going on,” he said. At the same time, he added, Northrop’s work on an electronic system for the F-15 fighter might compensate for the loss.

A Northrop spokesman said the consolidation wouldn’t affect a government ban imposed on one of its electronics units. The precision products division, which is based in Massachusetts and makes gyroscopes and other devices, faces criminal fraud charges and has been under Air Force suspension since July, 1989.

Northrop, which is fighting the suspension, said the government ban would spread to its other electronics units after the consolidation.

BACKGROUND

Northrop Corp.’s move to close its 28-year-old, 670,000-square-foot Newbury Park facility in Ventura County follows earlier decisions to shut its electronics operations in Anaheim and the sale of its corporate headquarters in Century City. The retrenchment has occurred amid declines in a number of Northrop’s businesses as the national defense budget decreases. It also occurs in the context of severe operational and legal problems at Northrop, which has experienced massive cost overruns and technical difficulties on the B-2 Stealth bomber.