Sonoco Products Co. is closing another plastics plant, telling Indiana state officials it plans to shutter a medical packaging thermoforming facility in Fremont. It said 53 employees would lose their jobs.
The closing of the Indiana plant comes about a month after Hartsville, S.C.-based Sonoco said it would close a thermoforming plant in Exeter, Calif., resulting in more than 300 job cuts.
In Fremont, the company told the Indiana Department of Workforce Development in an Oct. 10 letter under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act that it was "permanently closing" the plant and that job losses would happen in two phases, on Dec. 15 and on June 30.
The Fremont workforce is not unionized so employees do not have bumping rights for other facilities within the company, Sonoco said.
The letter did not say why the company was closing the plant but in its most recent quarterly financial report Aug. 2 it disclosed that parts of its plastics health care business were at risk of becoming impaired assets if performance did not improve.
Sonoco, which has more than 300 facilities and 22,000 employees worldwide, reported that its sales globally in the second quarter dropped 11 percent to $1.7 billion amid lower volumes and a "disruptive" market.
The company acquired the Fremont plant, known as Fremont TEQ, in 2019 when it bought the technical packaging business of ESCO Technologies Inc.
Fremont had been part of ESCO's Thermoform Engineered Quality LLC unit, along with two TEQ's facilities in Huntley, Ill.
The Sonoco TEQ unit makes medical, pharmaceutical and consumer thermoform packaging from plants in the U.S., the United Kingdom and Poland, with cleanrooms in each facility. It also has an injection molding plant in the Netherlands.
At the time of the TEQ acquisition, Sonoco's then-CEO said in a statement it would help the company expand into a growing health care packaging market.
Sonoco had $750 million in North American thermoforming sales in the most recent Plastics News ranking, placing at No. 5 with an estimated 145 thermoforming lines. It said on its website that the TEQ unit has more than 30 thermoforming lines globally.