The workers are being let off in stages, and by the end of July, its test plant will be closed. The assembly plant ceased production at the end of last month.

Sources told The Edge Financial Daily yesterday that while workers at the logistics unit would be the last to be dismissed on Sept 30, about 100 employees from the corporate services section would be retained.

All the machinery from the plants are being shipped in stages to the Spansion plant in Bangkok.

In February, US-based flash memory maker Spansion Inc, Spansion Penang’s parent company, announced that it would slash its workforce by 35% or about 3,000 workers from its facilities around the globe. More than half of the total would come from its Penang plant.

By Feb 23, Spansion Inc had completed shedding a third of its global workforce. It had said then that the decision to axe jobs was unavoidable due to the global recession.

Sunnyvale, California-based Spansion began as a joint venture between Advanced Micro Devices Inc and Fujitsu Ltd in 1993. Its flash memory products are integrated into a variety of electronic devices such as cell phones, high-definition TVs and set-top boxes.

Under its VSS, employees who have served two years or less were offered 10 days’ pay and a month’s salary in lieu of notice, while those who have clocked five years or more were offered 20 days’ pay and two months’ salary in lieu of notice. The offer for employees in between the two categories was 15 days’ pay and 1.5 months’ salary.

This article appeared in The Edge Financial Daily, July 17, 2009.