Contract Manufacturing | 847 Gibraltar Drive, Milpitas, 4 June 2007 — The Same Building, a Different Name Over the Door

There are two photographs of this frontage in Milpitas. In one the building is white with a red stripe and a small red sign over the door. In the other it is grey, and FLEXTRONICS runs across the parapet. Same building, same car park, different company. Solectron began in 1977 as a solar energy idea. The name is a portmanteau of solar and electronics, and the first customer's product was a controller for solar equipment. Assembly work for Silicon Valley firms was supposed to raise money for the solar business. The solar business never happened and the assembly work turned into an industry. Roy Kusumoto lost $150,000 in the first full year. Winston Chen, a manufacturing specialist then at IBM, joined in 1978 and eventually ran the company. What set Solectron apart was not scale at first but quality, in a business that had a reputation for having none. It won the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in 1991 and again in 1997, the first manufacturer to take it twice. The Commerce Department citation from October 1997 is a good snapshot: revenue of $3.7 billion, more than 18,000 employees, seventeen locations. Milpitas, Charlotte, Everett, Austin and Westborough at home; Dunfermline, Bordeaux, Herrenberg, Guadalajara, São Paulo, Penang, Johor, Suzhou and Tokyo abroad. Competitors said so out loud. Flextronics' chief executive told a trade magazine in 1999 that Solectron gave the whole industry a good name, and analysts described it as the measuring stick everyone else was held against. By 2001 the company was running $18.7 billion of revenue and about 60,000 people. Then the telecommunications market collapsed, the plants it had bought from its own customers turned into overhead, and it never recovered its position. On 4 June 2007 Solectron and Flextronics announced a definitive merger agreement. Solectron shareholders were offered 0.345 Flextronics shares or $3.89 in cash per share, valuing the company at roughly $3.7 billion on the previous Friday's price. The deal closed that October, and the company that had set the standard for the industry was absorbed into a competitor eight years older than itself and registered in Singapore. The merger filings give Solectron's address as 847 Gibraltar Drive, and an earlier company profile puts it at 777 Gibraltar Drive, so the head office moved a few hundred metres down one street across its whole life. Gibraltar Drive is a street of low pale buildings behind clipped landscaping, and nothing on it marks what was worked out inside. Photos: Milpitas guy, public domain; Chipermc, CC BY-SA 3.0; both via Wikimedia Commons.