Xidex to Close Irvine Plant, Lay Off 800 Workers

Xidex Corp., a leading manufacturer of hard disks for storing computer data, said Thursday that it is closing its Irvine manufacturing plant and dismissing roughly 800 workers.

The company decided to consolidate the disk business at its Santa Clara, Calif., headquarters after Seagate Technology--its biggest customer--canceled millions of dollars in orders, said a spokesman for Xidex’s corporate parent, Anacomp Inc. No more than 30 to 40 of Xidex’s 825 employees in Irvine will be offered transfers to Santa Clara, the spokesman said.

“I got here at 3 p.m., and my boss said I should clean out my desk and locker, everything,” said Hai V. Phan, an electronics technician who has been with the company for four years.

One of the biggest work force reductions ever in Orange County, the layoffs at Xidex underscore a continuing slump in the market for computer disks. The devices, which are mounted in personal computers, hold electronically recorded data in their magnetic coatings.

The cutbacks come only six weeks after Xidex was acquired for $400 million by Anacomp. An Indianapolis-based maker of computer systems and software, Anacomp said it is more interested in Xidex’s other businesses and expects computer disks to be an increasingly small part of its sales.

Xidex began slashing its 825-person Irvine work force last week, handing out paychecks to about 180 of the employees and sending them away as they showed up for work. Another group was laid off Thursday and the rest are to be discharged today.

Workers Stunned

Of the 825 workers, about 725 were blue-collar employees and 100 were administrators and engineers. The employees will receive benefits packages based on their length of employment, Anacomp said.

The layoffs left some workers stunned.

Sunshine Barcindebar, 37, a chemical technician who worked for Xidex for six years, said: “I feel lost. When you’ve worked at a place as long as I’ve worked here, it feels like home.”

The plant had been in operation for seven years, first by another manufacturer, Charlton Associates, before being acquired by Xidex in 1986.

Seagate cut back its orders because demand for disk drives, which read and record computer data on hard disks, has been far less than the company expected. Seagate, the nation’s largest manufacturer of such drives for personal computer manufacturers, spent millions of dollars on expanding its production facilities only to meet lukewarm demand.

That left Seagate with “a hell of a lot of drives in inventory,”’ said Jack McLaughlin, president of Business Research Consultants, a San Jose research firm.

The company laid off 1,000 of its own workers last summer in Scotts Valley, Calif., and Singapore. Seagate’s Orange County manufacturing operation, however, recently expanded and moved from Brea to Anaheim.

Anacomp, meanwhile, seems far more interested in Xidex’s other high-technology products, among them microfilm used to reproduce original documents.

Xidex makes rigid oxide disks. Sales of that type of disk are expected to drop sharply in coming years as they are replaced by a new type of disk that can store more information, using what is called thin-film technology.

Times staff writers Leslie Berkman and David Olmos contributed to this report.