Nellcor Moving Plant From the Bay Area to Chula Vista
Nellcor, a manufacturer of hospital patient monitoring equipment, announced it is moving all its remaining manufacturing operations to Chula Vista from Hayward, a move that will cause the layoffs of 160 of its San Francisco Bay Area employees.
The move will complete a shift of manufacturing capacity to the San Diego-Tijuana area that Nellcor began four years ago. The company already has a Chula Vista plant as well as a Tijuana maquiladora employing 450 workers where the disposable parts of its instruments are assembled.
Nellcor, whose principal product is a pulse oximeter, a device that measures the oxygen in a patient’s blood, will soon move into a 90,000-square-foot plant in Chula Vista now under construction.
Nellcor is one of many medical instrument and product firms that have moved to the San Diego-Tijuana area in the last few years to take advantage of low-cost Mexican labor, said Michael Smith, a real estate broker with John Burnham & Co. in downtown San Diego who represented Nellcor in its Chula Vista transaction.
A publicly owned company, Nellcor has increased its sales from $46 million in 1986 to $142 million for the fiscal year ended last June 30. Its blood oximeter was one of the first devices to measure blood oxygen on a real-time basis, enabling hospital clinicians to avoid the time-consuming process of sending blood samples to laboratories for analysis.
Nellcor will keep its administrative headquarters in Hayward, where, after the layoffs, the company will still retain 320 employees. About 80% of those losing their jobs are manufacturing workers, and the rest are administrative employees, said Michael Downey, Nellcor’s chief financial officer.
