Toshiba America Sacks 50 Engineers at San Jose Plant in Retrenchment : Computers: Irvine subsidiary of Toshiba Corp. will shift development of 3.5 hard disk drive to Japan to save money.

Toshiba America Information Systems Inc. in Irvine said Thursday that it has laid off 50 engineers at its hard disk drive plant in San Jose.

The move is part of a money-saving decision to shift all new product development for the company’s 3.5 hard disk drive to Japan, said the subsidiary of Tokyo-based Toshiba Corp.

The layoff at the 300-worker facility is effective immediately, Toshiba spokesman Robert A. Wittenburg said Thursday. “They were notified this morning.”

The job cuts come 19 months after Toshiba announced that it had developed a high-capacity computer disk drive line and opened the San Jose factory to build it. But with stiff competition and a slowdown of the economy, the company has been forced to pull back wherever necessary, Wittenburg said.

“We feel we can do the job more efficiently and more competitively and eliminate the redundancy of work done in Japan and here,” Wittenburg said.

He emphasized that the San Jose plant will not close its production facility, however, and will keep assembly-line workers and engineers at the plant to oversee manufacturing of products already developed.

Last year, Toshiba said it was forced to shift manufacturing of its high-quality color display portable computers to Japan because of tariffs imposed by the U.S. Commerce Department, which alleged that the screens were sold below cost. The tariffs penalized companies for shipping screen parts to the United States but not for shipping whole computers.