Hubbell Inc. executives said they are looking to “take out about 1 million square feet or roughly 10% of our footprint of manufacturing and warehouse space” during the company’s quarterly earnings conference call on July 30.
William R. Sperry, executive vice president, chief financial officer and treasurer of the Shelton electrical and electronic products manufacturer, added that Hubbell expects to invest about $60 million over the next two years to consolidate operations, noting that two “high-cost Northeast facilities” and another two “subscale facilities” will be sacrificed.
The high-cost facilities were in reference to its factories in Newtown and Bethel, which the company said in June would be closed, at a cost of 140 and 54 jobs, respectively.
“We’re able to take advantage where we have common competencies and processes and other facilities,” Sperry said. “We can utilize the square footage that we’ve already got, and have the effect of getting our sales per square foot up, and our gross margins up. So we still think we have runway here, and in fact we continue to build projects that we think have really attractive paybacks.”
After the closings, Hubbell ”“ which renewed its Shelton lease earlier this year ”“ will have about 650 Connecticut employees. Worldwide it employs 20,000.
