Posted 12:04 pm Friday, May 23, 2008
Large Troup Employer NDS Closing Effective Sept. 30
By GREG JUNEK
Business Editor
California-based NDS Inc. on Thursday confirmed it will close its Troup factory, effective Sept. 30, and at least 140 employees will lose their jobs.
Business Editor
California-based NDS Inc. on Thursday confirmed it will close its Troup factory, effective Sept. 30, and at least 140 employees will lose their jobs.
“We are consolidating our injection molding manufacturing into one factory, which we have in California,” said NDS President and CEO Mike Gummeson.
The Troup plant makes plastic injection molded products, including valve boxes, meter boxes, heating-ventilation-air conditioning pads and plastic valves for pools, spas and plumbing applications. Gummeson said the Troup factory employs about 110 people and also has 30 to 35 contract workers.
Some of the employees are being given the opportunity to move to the California factory, he said.
Troup Mayor John Whitsell said NDS is a major employer, which increased its employee number to about 200 a few years ago in a plant expansion.
“It will be certainly very detrimental. You could probably equate it to Kelly Springfield leaving Tyler, scale-wise,” Whitsell said of the loss. “The school district is probably the highest employer, and (NDS) was probably second or third. … When you look at a population of 2,000, that’s 10 percent (when the company had about 200 employees).”
Four years ago, NDS chose to expand its Troup facility over locating in Greenville, which was offering an incentive to construct a new building for the company and lease it to NDS for a minimal amount. Troup placed $50,000 in its half-cent sales tax revenue toward the project.
Whitsell, who is also treasurer of the Troup Community Development Corp., said that organization is always working to attract employers, and it will continue. A company would find great benefits in moving to Troup, he said, including an excellent school system.
Gummeson said NDS has, for the past four or five years, worked on “simplifying our operating footprint,” or reducing the number of factories and warehouses to reduce costs and improve service. In the past three years it has more than doubled the capacity of the factory into which the Troup operation is moving.
In the past several years the company has reduced its number of warehouses from 10 to five and its number of factories from five to two, which includes the closure of the Troup factory.
The consolidation of the Troup plant’s operations into the California plant will bring the number of NDS factories down to one injection molding facility and one facility dedicated to its drip irrigation business, Gummeson said.
