Seagate on hiring spree for Longmont facility
More than 200 employees being added, mostly engineers
POSTED: 05/17/2012 09:00:00 AM MDT
UPDATED: 05/18/2012 01:52:03 PM MDT Tony Kindelspire The Longmont Times-Call
LONGMONT -- Seagate Technology, already Longmont's largest private-sector employer, is hiring.
The company said Thursday it has hired 86 new full-time employees so far this year and 38 interns, and it has more than 100 positions it still wants to fill. About 80 percent of the new hires are engineers, according to Andy Davis, senior vice president of design engineering for Seagate.
"We had quit hiring for probably a year, just given the uncertainty in the world economy, for the most part," said Davis, whose other companywide responsibilities include firmware -- a combination of software and hardware -- and other chip engineering.
Seagate still has 117 positions to fill at its Longmont facility, he said. The company is looking for a range of experience, from seasoned engineers to graduates fresh out of college. The company also is hiring for other ancillary positions.
"We've been aggressive at recruiting new graduates," he said, adding that the younger people have brought a new energy into the building.
Davis said 80 percent of all the new hires will be engineers.
"Those are all great jobs," said John Cody, president and CEO of the Longmont Area Economic Council. "That industry pays extremely well."
Software engineers in Boulder County draw an average annual salary of about $90,000, according to the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment.
The Longmont site is one of two Seagate design centers in the U.S.; the other is in Minnesota. It also has a design center in Singapore and another in Korea, which it picked up in its recent acquisition of the hard disk drive business of Samsung.
Improved profit margins are one reason for the increased head count at Seagate's Longmont facility, Davis said.
Seagate's buyout of the HDD business from Samsung and Western Digital's recent acquisition of Hitachi Global Storage Technology -- which is now called Viviti Technologies -- has left just two major playersglobally in the hard drive business: Seagate and Western Digital. Less competition means higher prices.
Also, Davis said, as tragic as the severe flooding in parts of Thailand at the end of 2010 was, it has helped revenues for both Seagate and Western Digital. The floods not only killed hundreds of people but they disrupted multiple industries, including data storage. Western Digital had two of its facilities inundated by floodwaters, and though no Seagate facilities were directly affected, its suppliers' facilities were, which affected production for months.
By the early part of 2011, the demand for hard drives was about one-third higher than the available supply, driving prices up, Davis said.
"It really enlightened our customers to the strategic nature of storage," he said. "They had been treating it as a commodity for so long."
A change in strategy by Seagate also is leading to more jobs in Longmont.
The primary mission of the Longmont design center is product development, from the conceptual stage to product launch. That means a big part of what happens in Longmont is prototyping manufacturing. Full-scale manufacturing takes place at the company's facilities in the Far East, where the cost of manufacturing is much lower.
At one time, Davis said, 120,000 to 150,000 drives were manufactured annually in Longmont to support the company's R&D. But a few years ago the company decided to dramatically reduce the number of drives produced locally.
"Previously we would build as many as 30,000 drives per model, but we went down to about 10,000 drives per product," said Jeet Poonia, the director of process engineering at the Longmont site.
But that strategy backfired when the cost savings of doing some of the early-stage manufacturing of a product overseas didn't outweigh the other issues that came up, Davis said.
"We gave up the idea of sending that overseas," he said.
Cody said that so-called onshoring has become more common with U.S. companies.
"It's been a scene that we have been seeing for the past couple of years, but a little bit under the radar," he said. "Without being specific to any one industry, people were mesmerized by the price side of things, but people are realizing that cost is an important component but only one."
Cody said that he didn't see any particular downside to consolidation in the hard drive industry, particularly since both Seagate and Western Digital have a presence in Longmont -- the latter employing about 185 in Longmont and the former 1,160, according to the LAEC's latest numbers.
Seagate's stock (Nasdaq: STX) closed down $1.57, or 5 percent, to $28.67 on Thursday. Year-to-date, the company's stock price has climbed 76 percent, and it's up 73 percent over the past 12 months.
Read more: Seagate on hiring spree for Longmont facility - The Denver Post Seagate on hiring spree for Longmont facility - The Denver Post
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More than 200 employees being added, mostly engineers
POSTED: 05/17/2012 09:00:00 AM MDT
UPDATED: 05/18/2012 01:52:03 PM MDT Tony Kindelspire The Longmont Times-Call
LONGMONT -- Seagate Technology, already Longmont's largest private-sector employer, is hiring.
The company said Thursday it has hired 86 new full-time employees so far this year and 38 interns, and it has more than 100 positions it still wants to fill. About 80 percent of the new hires are engineers, according to Andy Davis, senior vice president of design engineering for Seagate.
"We had quit hiring for probably a year, just given the uncertainty in the world economy, for the most part," said Davis, whose other companywide responsibilities include firmware -- a combination of software and hardware -- and other chip engineering.
Seagate still has 117 positions to fill at its Longmont facility, he said. The company is looking for a range of experience, from seasoned engineers to graduates fresh out of college. The company also is hiring for other ancillary positions.
"We've been aggressive at recruiting new graduates," he said, adding that the younger people have brought a new energy into the building.
Davis said 80 percent of all the new hires will be engineers.
"Those are all great jobs," said John Cody, president and CEO of the Longmont Area Economic Council. "That industry pays extremely well."
Software engineers in Boulder County draw an average annual salary of about $90,000, according to the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment.
The Longmont site is one of two Seagate design centers in the U.S.; the other is in Minnesota. It also has a design center in Singapore and another in Korea, which it picked up in its recent acquisition of the hard disk drive business of Samsung.
Improved profit margins are one reason for the increased head count at Seagate's Longmont facility, Davis said.
Seagate's buyout of the HDD business from Samsung and Western Digital's recent acquisition of Hitachi Global Storage Technology -- which is now called Viviti Technologies -- has left just two major playersglobally in the hard drive business: Seagate and Western Digital. Less competition means higher prices.
Also, Davis said, as tragic as the severe flooding in parts of Thailand at the end of 2010 was, it has helped revenues for both Seagate and Western Digital. The floods not only killed hundreds of people but they disrupted multiple industries, including data storage. Western Digital had two of its facilities inundated by floodwaters, and though no Seagate facilities were directly affected, its suppliers' facilities were, which affected production for months.
By the early part of 2011, the demand for hard drives was about one-third higher than the available supply, driving prices up, Davis said.
"It really enlightened our customers to the strategic nature of storage," he said. "They had been treating it as a commodity for so long."
A change in strategy by Seagate also is leading to more jobs in Longmont.
The primary mission of the Longmont design center is product development, from the conceptual stage to product launch. That means a big part of what happens in Longmont is prototyping manufacturing. Full-scale manufacturing takes place at the company's facilities in the Far East, where the cost of manufacturing is much lower.
At one time, Davis said, 120,000 to 150,000 drives were manufactured annually in Longmont to support the company's R&D. But a few years ago the company decided to dramatically reduce the number of drives produced locally.
"Previously we would build as many as 30,000 drives per model, but we went down to about 10,000 drives per product," said Jeet Poonia, the director of process engineering at the Longmont site.
But that strategy backfired when the cost savings of doing some of the early-stage manufacturing of a product overseas didn't outweigh the other issues that came up, Davis said.
"We gave up the idea of sending that overseas," he said.
Cody said that so-called onshoring has become more common with U.S. companies.
"It's been a scene that we have been seeing for the past couple of years, but a little bit under the radar," he said. "Without being specific to any one industry, people were mesmerized by the price side of things, but people are realizing that cost is an important component but only one."
Cody said that he didn't see any particular downside to consolidation in the hard drive industry, particularly since both Seagate and Western Digital have a presence in Longmont -- the latter employing about 185 in Longmont and the former 1,160, according to the LAEC's latest numbers.
Seagate's stock (Nasdaq: STX) closed down $1.57, or 5 percent, to $28.67 on Thursday. Year-to-date, the company's stock price has climbed 76 percent, and it's up 73 percent over the past 12 months.
Read more: Seagate on hiring spree for Longmont facility - The Denver Post Seagate on hiring spree for Longmont facility - The Denver Post
Read The Denver Post's Terms of Use of its content: Terms of Use - The Denver Post
