Liberty Lake-based Telect closing Texas plant

Liberty Lake telecommunication hardware company Telect Inc. is closing a Texas factory and laying off 116 workers there.

A number of those positions will relocate to the Liberty Lake Telect office, which has between 90 and 100 workers, company CEO Wayne Williams said.

He said it’s not certain how many jobs will be added here. Some of the manufacturing done in Texas will be taken over by Spokane-area contract manufacturers that already make components for Telect’s product line, he said.

Telect makes and assembles power and rack network infrastructure equipment for the telecom, utility, enterprise and data center industries.

It acquired the Plano, Texas, site in 2004. It’s been Telect’s primary producer of metal products and accessories.

Williams said the closure, while painful, allows Telect to focus on a “variable cost model” that saves money by relying more on local suppliers and contract manufacturers.

“It lets us concentrate on investing in our innovations and bring products to market faster,” he said.

Williams said in a news release, “We were driven to this (Plano) decision for a number of reasons, including the need to reduce our higher fixed-cost model and more smoothly adapt to our customers’ ever-changing buying cycles.”

The plan for next year is to consolidate Spokane-area operations in a larger Liberty Lake building and resume some manufacturing, Williams said. Except for brief projects, Telect has not manufactured its products locally for about a dozen years, he said.

Williams added he could not disclose terms of the real estate deal for the new headquarters building.