The history of the R&D centre at Ansty Park, Coventry, which current owner Ericsson is closing with the loss of 700 jobs, highlights the changes which have taken place in the UK's telecoms industry on the last decade.
The R&D facility was part of a huge telecoms complex created by Marconi at the peak of the telecoms boom of the late 1990s.
Marconi announced the plan to create 2,200 engineering jobs over a five year period in the building of the R&D centre on the site of a former airfield in Ansty near Coventry
With the inclusion of the New Century Park staff, there will be 5,000 employees at the Ansty site in five years time, said Marconi. Manufacturing will continue at Marconi¹s other Coventry site at New Horizon Park.
But the timing was unfortunate and within a year the telecoms market was spiralling into a downturn.
Marconi, the UK's last telecoms equipment supplier, suffered badly and by the summer of 2001 was cutting thousands of jobs across the company.
Plans for Antsy Park were doomed to failure.
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As part of cost-cutting Marconi outsourced the bulk of its networks manufacturing capacity to contract manufacturer Jabil Circuit and R&D activities were cut accordingly.
Marconi limped along for five years until the start of 2006 when Ericsson bought the telecoms equipment and services business for around £1.2bn.
Ericsson acquired the Ansty Park site and started the job of building the R&D centre.
In August 2007, Ericsson focused its UK telecoms R&D activities on Ansty Park with the amalgamation of the other former Marconi R&D activities from the larger New Century Park site in Coventry.
At that time around 650 staff worked at the Ansty site.
“We acquired two research efforts essentially from Marconi in the UK, advanced telecoms research and optical research. The site at Ansty is currently a greenfield site and we have applied for planning permission. We expect ground breaking to be in January next year and the first people to move there in Q2 2009,” said a spokesman for Ericsson.
The intention then was to maintain the UK R&D effort which gave Ericsson valuable intellectual property and experience, particularly in the optical communications systems, which was the foundation of the Marconi telecoms transmission business in the 1990s.
Earlier this year Gordon Brown visited the new R&D centre at Ansty Park and there were plans to invest around £44m on infrastructure in and around the site.
But Ansty Park was not strong enough to survive the 2009 market downturn which followed the global financial crisis.
Ericsson, this week said it would withdraw its UK based R&D activities from the Coventry site with the loss of 700 jobs by the middle of 2010.
According to Mats Granryd, head of market unit north western Europe at Ericsson: “We have to work continuously to increase efficiency and lower our cost base.”
The R&D activities at Ansty Park, which focus on network infrastructure, will be moved to larger Ericsson facilities in other countries.
What will remain are Ericsson’s local UK managed services activities. Bu the R&D cuts mean that the Ansty Park facility will no longer be viable.
And so another chapter in the UK's telecoms history closes.