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.
#
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.