Intel announces that it will close or stop production at five of its manufacturing facilities, including plants in Oregon and California. The closings will take place in 2009 and could affect between 5,000 and 6,000 employees once all of Intel's plans are finalized. Intel says these closings will not affect its production of 45-nanometer processors used in desktops and notebooks or its upcoming line of 32-nm chips.
In a statement, Intel said it would close two assembly test facilities in Penang,
Malaysia, as well as one
facility in Cavite, Philippines.
In addition, Intel plans to stop production at Fab 20 in Hillsboro,
Ore., which is an older 200-millimeter
wafer facility. The company also plans to stop wafer production at D2, located
in Santa Clara, Calif.,
near Intel's corporate headquarters.
Together, the closing could eliminate between 5,000 and 6,000 jobs within
the company, which now has more than 83,000 employees worldwide. Some of those
workers will be offered positions at those facilities that remain open, said Chuck
Mulloy, an Intel spokesperson.
Intel could possibly save millions of dollars in 2009 by closing these
facilities, according to at least one analyst. However, Intel's statement and its
spokesperson did not say exactly how much the company would save by closing
these plants.
While Intel routinely checks its worldwide manufacturing network to see
which facilities it can close or repurpose for other tasks, Mulloy said the
tough economic situation meant that Intel had to accelerate that process in
order to bring its manufacturing capacity in line with current chip demand.
"In that environment, we accelerated much longer-term plans to take
these factories offline," Mulloy said. "They would have come off the
factory network at some time but this just accelerates it."
Of the five facilities that Intel is closing, most were plants using older
200-mm technology. For example, the Oregon
facility has been in existence since 1988. Most of Intel's microprocessors are
now built using 300-mm silicon wafers, although some of the company's NAND
flash chips and other products use older 200-mm technology.
In an interview, Mulloy said the closing will not stop Intel from continuing
to make its new 45-nanometer microprocessors. Intel
also plans to switch to 32-nm chip manufacturing later in 2009.
Right now, those 32-nm processors, code-named Westmere, are being developed
at another facility in Oregon,
and when those chips are ready for full production, Intel intends to
manufacture them at one or more facilities throughout the world. Mulloy said
the plants that are being considered for 32-nm production include facilities in
Oregon, New
Mexico, Arizona,
Ireland and Israel.
John Spooner, an analyst with Technology Business Research, said Intel is in
a unique position since it has many more chip manufacturing facilities, or fabs,
than other semiconductor companies do. In order to reduce costs at a time when
demand for PCs, server systems and other hardware has slowed, closing or
halting production makes solid financial sense for the company.
"The bottom line is that Intel has more capacity
than it can handle right now," Spooner said. "I think part of that
has to do with the market and Intel's customers telling the company that they
are going to hold off orders right now and into the next quarter or so. In
turn, Intel has to scale back production so it doesn't have a large amount of
inventory on hand. One way to scale back production is to close older
facilities, which are also not that efficient."
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