Hewlett-Packard Co has now offloaded more of its printed circuit assembly capacity to third parties, with an agreement to sell off the equipment from its Richardson, Texas, based manufacturing facility. The buyer is Wilmington, Massachusetts-based Altron Inc, which plans to establish a 30,000 square foot manufacturing plant in the Dallas, Texas area, for printed circuit assembly, backplane assembly, and systems integration, as well as for new products. Contract manufacturer Altron said it would hire a number of staff from HP’s Richardson facility to support its operation, which it expects to be up and running by the fourth quarter. The date of the purchase transaction is expected to be September 1. HP reckons it can implement a more efficient business model through outsourcing manufacturing. Back in May, Jabil Circuit Inc from St Petersberg, Florida, agreed to acquire the manufacturing assets of HP’s LaserJet Solutions Group. 28 year-old Altron currently has four plants, three in the East and one in the West. Its customers included 3Com Corp, Cisco Systems Inc, Lucent Technology Corp and Sun Microsystems Inc. HP has been a customer for some time.
