IBM Corp is trimming the Storage Systems Division, cutting 320 jobs immediately at its plants in San Jose, California and Rochester, Minnesota, but it is also transferring high-volume disk drive assembly and test from San Jose to an unspecified Asian location, and that will cost another 800 jobs in San Jose by the end of next year. It said thin-film disk platter manufacturing and wafer production for advanced magneto-resistive heads will remain in San Jose and Mainz. The division also plans to review its European operations to look for ways in which to cuts costs as part of its aim of becoming the world’s lowest cost disk drive manufacturer – the company has come to the conclusion that it doesn’t really need to design each disk drive family from the ground up, and that it could really design them all around a common set of parts. In Europe, the Mainz and Havant factories will come under review, and IBM is looking seriously at the possibility of moving to a low cost manufacturing location in Eastern Europe – Bulgaria still retains a residual expertise in disk drive manufacture. In Japan, high-volume disk- drive manufacturing has already been moved from the Fujisawa plant to Thai land, but development, pil ot production, and some engineering support func tions remain in Fujisawa.
