About 100 people will lose their jobs as Sony closes the company's last polycarbonate disc replication and mastering operations in the United States and transfers production overseas.
Sony DADC US Inc., in a letter to the Indiana Department of Workforce Development and local officials, said layoffs at the company's facility in Terre Haute, Ind., will begin March 15 with additional terminations through March 31.
Disc manufacturing in Terre Haute, Sony's last such U.S. location, is expected to cease by the middle of this year.
About 150 Sony employees will continue at the location, said Lisa Gephardt, senior director of corporate communications at Sony Corp. of America, on Jan. 19.
"Distribution, manufacturing assembly, client services and graphic studio services will remain in operation in the Terre Haute site," she said.
Work once done in Indiana is shifting to Sony DADC's main Central European manufacturing location in Salzburg, Austria.
Discs and packaging will be produced in Austria and transported to Terre Haute for assembly once the changes take place. "The packaging will be produced in Austria. It will be shipped to the U.S., assembled in the U.S., and then distributed out to wherever it needs to go," Gephardt said.
The Indiana facility has not only handled music and video disc manufacturing, but also it makes video games for Sony's popular PlayStation product line.
"This setup allows Sony DADC to remain a strong and reliable partner as end-to-end service provider for the entertainment industry and beyond," the company said in a statement.
The demand for discs, whether they contain video, music or video games, continues to decline as consumers move more toward digital platforms for their entertainment. These evolving consumer habits drove Sony to consolidate disc manufacturing. This is not the first time layoffs have hit the Indiana location as content delivery preferences change.
Sony DADC, or Digital Audio Disc Corp., indicated those being laid off do not have so-called "bumping rights" to displace any of the other 150 or so employees who will remain at the Terre Haute location, according to the letter to the state.
Sony revealed the layoffs in a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN) letter sent to state and local officials Jan. 13. Companies with at least 100 workers are required by federal law to give advance notice of plant closings or significant layoffs. The WARN Act was passed in 1988 in response to a series of high-profile and abrupt plant closures that gave workers and communities little or no notice.
This round of layoffs follows a January 2018 move that cut 375 workers at the site.