Winston Salem
? With its hosiery sales falling 18% for the first half of 2009, Hanesbrands is
to end production at its Winston-Salem plant in North Carolina by the
end of 2010, with the loss of 240 jobs.
The company attributed the closure of the
50-year-old Weeks plant to the long-term decline in consumer demand for sheer
hosiery products with sales in 2008 also down by 14%.
Manufacturing will start slowing down in
the second quarter of 2010 and cease by the end of the year.
The company?s sheer hosiery distribution
operations at the Weeks plant, known as the East Coast distribution centre,
will relocate to Hanesbrands? existing distribution centre in nearby Rural Hall
by the second quarter of 2010. About 80 distribution employees at Weeks will be
reassigned to work at the Almondridge centre.
The company, whose brands include Bali, Champion, Playtex and Wonderbra, said the shutdown
of the plant would not impact its research, product development, quality
control and engineering functions, which employ about 200, at the Weeks
location. It will sell the 850,000-square-foot facility and lease it back once
the hosiery production stops.
?As a result of lower consumer demand, our
sheer-hosiery production volume has dropped to a point that it is no longer
feasible to run the plant," said Bruce Duncan, the vice president of
knit-to-shape manufacturing for the company.
Hanes Hosiery Mills Co. opened Weeks in
1960 ? then the largest manufacturing plant ever built in North Carolina ? spending the modern
equivalent of about US$219 million. At the time, the plant had enough machines
to double Hanes' previous annual production capacity to 100 million pairs of
stockings.
At the end of 2008, Hanesbrands announced
plans to close its last large knitted fabric plant in the US. This was
followed in April with the closure of the Barnwell, South
Carolina, sock-knitting plant which saw production transferred to El Salvador.
