THE opening of a new hi-tech electronics plant in Hamilton
yesterday brought light to the gloom which has pervaded Silicon Glen in recent months.
Scottish sub-contractors to the main computer manufacturers have been forced to lay off hundreds of employees as the Asian economic crisis has deepened a cyclical downturn in the global electronics industry.
But the inauguration of DuPont Photomask's #12m plant at Hamilton International Technology Park served as a reminder that many electronics companies are still keen to invest in Scotland because the country offers a reliable supply of highly-trained technicians and science graduates.
The plant will make
photomasks - high purity quartz plates that transfer the image of electronic circuits onto silicon wafers used to make semi-conductor chips for computers. This is sophisticated work conducted in a clean room environment and up to 80% of DuPont's employees in Scotland will be university graduates.
Initially the Hamilton facility will employ 30 people, but Preston Adcox, the president of Photomasks, predicted the workforce would increase to between 150 and 200 over the next three years.
Locate in Scotland provided unspecified incentives to persuade the US-based firm to come North of the Border and Lanarkshire Development Agency offered a package of training assistance.
George Bennett, the head of Motorola in Scotland and chairman of the Scottish Electronics Forum, said the arrival of DuPont had added an important new block to the infrastructure of the country's electronics industry.
''This project again underlines that the electronics industry can provide jobs here for young people with the right skills and
qualifications,'' Bennet said.
Firms which engage in sophisticated high-added value activities, such as DuPont and Cadence Design Systems of California, which will soon employ 1900 highly-skilled people designing computer chips in Livingston, do indeed appear to have a secure future in Scotland.
But life is likely to prove more precarious for those companies, which depend on assembly work and the manufacture of relatively low-tech components.
Two printed circuit board manufacturers in the Borders, Viasystems and Signum recently laid off 250 staff and put others on short-time working as a result of the slowdown in world demand for computers. And a third PCB manufacturer in Ayrshire, Prestwick Circuits, issued a profits warning this week.
Lite-On has meanwhile dismissed 230 of its 350 workers at its recently-opened factory at Mossend in Lanarkshire because it is transferring the production of computer monitors back to Taiwan.
Bennet recognised that such sub-contractors, which account for 25,000 of the 70,000 jobs in Scotland's electronics industry, are most vulnerable in the present climate.
But he said Motorola, which employs 3000 people making mobile phones and other electronics equipment at plants in East Kilbride, South Queensferry and Bathgate, had not yet been
obliged to lay off staff.
Looking ahead, Bennet said it was difficult to predict when the global demand for computers would start to recover. ''I don't know how far it's going to go down. The forecast so far is that this year's going to be flat, whereas normally I would expect 15% annual growth,'' he said.
He said the computer industry normally went through four to five year cycles, but this time the downswing had been made more acute by the crisis in the Far East.
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