TECHNOLOGY - Feb. 1, 1996

Quantum to Close 2 Plants, Slash Staff: The company said it will quit making its own high-end disk drives; close the factories, one in Malaysia and one at its Milpitas, Calif., headquarters; and lay off 2,250 employees, or about a quarter of its work force. The decision comes 15 months after Quantum Corp., a leading maker of low-end disk drives for desktop machines, paid $360 million for Digital Equipment Corp.’s high-capacity drive business. Those drives store data for mainframes and other large computer systems. Quantum said it will no longer make its own high-capacity drives and will instead leave that to Matsushita-Kotobuki Electronics Industries of Japan. Quantum will take a charge of $160 million to $190 million in the January-March quarter, the company said.