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In some corners, the nugget that Bradenton-based Teltronics is moving from its old facility in southern Manatee County to newer digs in northern Manatee County is legitimate good news during a troubling economic time.
Publicly traded Teltronics makes and sells switches, panels and other phone and communication device-related products. The move will provide the company with a newer and bigger facility that includes 21,500 square feet of office space and 30,000 square feet of manufacturing space. And it's doing it at a discounted lease rate that befits the slumping commercial real estate market.
So the move is certainly good internal news for Teltronics, its employees and its shareholders.
Yet local economic development officials have trumpeted the move as a key one in shooting for the Holy Grail of Gulf Coast economic development: Industry diversity. “If we are going to create a more diverse economy in Manatee County,” Manatee County Economic Development Council Executive Director Eric Basinger says in a press release, “we must concentrate not only on attracting new targeted businesses, but also on retention and expansion of our existing businesses, such as Teltronics.”
Teltronics, however, hasn't exactly been the kind of gazelle that economic development gurus rave about. In fact, it's a company that, despite some stellar 2009 results, is coming off a difficult five-year run that nearly crippled the business.
For example, it lost $3.3 million in 2008, a year in which it ended by cutting its global workforce from 250 to 175 employees. Its shares have traded as high as $1.80 a share over the last year, but have also dropped to as low as a penny a share.
The company also struggled to post a string of consecutive profitable quarters for several years before 2008. “We are still limping along,” chief executive Ewen Cameron told the Review in a 2006 story. “We cannot get every quarter profitable, but we are working toward that. We are trying to get consistent.”
In addition to job cuts made at the end of 2008, Teltronics executives undertook a series of other cost-cutting measures last year, from shuttering a plant in Mexico to cutting salaries as much as 10% per employee to suspending its 401(k) matching program.
All of those moves turned out to be the right ones: As of the end of the third quarter, the company had reported a profit of $5.3 million for the first nine months of 2009, compared to a loss of $1.4 million for the first nine months of 2008.
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