Hughes Plans to Lay Off 200 Workers at Carlsbad Plant

Hughes Aircraft Co. said Tuesday that it will begin laying off as many as 200 employees at its Carlsbad plant over a 14-month period beginning next month because of a consolidation of a local product line with a newly acquired New Jersey operation.

The layoffs include all 150 workers at the display product line within Hughes’ Industrial Products Division in Carlsbad. In addition, 50 Hughes support personnel in Carlsbad will also be laid off “unless business conditions change over the next year to 14 months,” a spokesman said.

Hughes’ display product line in Carlsbad is to be merged with the former Thomson Electronic Tubes & Devices Corp., a New Jersey-based unit of Thomson Components Corp. of France, which Hughes acquired in December. The business has been renamed Hughes Display Products Corp based in Dover, N.J. Hughes Aircraft is a unit of GM Hughes Electronics.

The layoffs will leave Hughes with about 1,325 employees in Carlsbad, including 625 in the Industrial Products Division. The division manufactures a variety of electronics components and systems, including infrared systems, test equipment and computer graphics projectors.

Hughes also employs about 700 people in Carlsbad at its microelectronics center, which does research in support of its semiconductor technology. Both units are housed in plants near the Palomar Airport in Carlsbad.