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USA:Bandage maker Hartmann-Conco forsees layoffs |
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2004-12-9
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Rock Hill, South Carolina based bandage maker Hartmann-Conco is expected to lay-off 95 of its 179 employees over the next year.
Announcing this President and CEO Jacques Lemmetti said that the medical textiles company will begin the lay-off process on the manufacturing side starting February.
He reasoned that overseas competition and shrinking medical textiles market prices were behind the layoffs, Lemmetti said. The company product''s include support, compression and fixation bandaging products that are sold to hospitals, sports markets, veterinarians and large drug store chains.
"We''re getting killed, like a lot of other companies, unfortunately," Lemmetti said. "We have just been hammered over the last three years."
The company plans to help the affected workers find other jobs.
"We''re trying to take care of them as much as we can," Lemmetti said.
Hartmann-Conco, formerly Conco Medical Co., came to Rock Hill in 1990 and has been at TechPark since 1994. Paul Hartmann Corp., a subsidiary of Paul Hartmann AG of Heidenheim, Germany, bought the company in 2001 to expand its sales and marketing in the United States.
Hartmann-Conco still will do some manufacturing in Rock Hill and doesn''t plan to leave TechPark, Lemmetti said.
Earlier in October, Celanese Acetate another SC company announced it would lay off about 200 workers at its Celriver Plant by mid-2005. Springs Industries, form there also have had significant layoffs in the past years.
It seems that the city''s textile past is making way for new industries like metal working and automotive industries that seem to be growing in the region, in the direction of manufacturing, said Stephen Turner, director of the Rock Hill Economic Development Corp.
The S.C. Employment Security Commission''s latest figures showed York County with a 7.5 percent unemployment rate in October, down slightly from a rate of 7.8 percent in September but still above the statewide rate of 6.5 percent. |
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