Sony plans new Rancho Bernardo office tower

By: BRADLEY J. FIKES - Staff Writer | Tuesday, June 26, 2007 12:09 AM PDT ∞

RANCHO BERNARDO -- Sony Electronics' national headquarters here is getting an upgrade.

The consumer electronics giant plans to build an 11-story office tower on its Rancho Bernardo campus. The $150 million building is another sign of North County's importance to Sony Electronics, which came to the area in 1972.

Office tower construction is set to begin in November, and completion for the summer of 2009, Rick Clancy, a company spokesman, said Monday. Some of Sony Electronics' employees have been working out of leased buildings. These will be vacated and all of the company's local employees will work out of buildings it owns.

"There's been an evolution, and this development is the latest part of that evolution," Clancy said. "We started in the '70s, assembling televisions, and evolved from there to doing even more manufacturing."

The Rancho Bernardo location has had swings in employment, as some manufacturing operations have been phased out and others added. Sony Electronics upgraded its presence in Rancho Bernardo in 2004, when it relocated its headquarters here from Park Ridge, N.J.

Clancy has experienced that evolution personally. He and many other Sony Electronics employees moved to San Diego after the company relocated its headquarters here. The company is a unit of Sony Corporation of America, which itself is a part of Tokyo-based Sony Corp.

In Rancho Bernardo, Sony designs products and conducts sales and marketing. The Rancho Bernardo location is also a manufacturing center for such products as Sony VAIO laptop computers, its flat-panel LCD Bravia TV line and TV set-top boxes.

Sony has endured some rough years due to fiercer competition in areas such as digital music. And after rising for many years, local employment has been hit by layoffs during the last decade.

In 1998, local Sony Electronics employment rose to 4,500. A series of layoffs reduced that number. By late 2004, employment was down to 2,600. In January 2006, Sony shut down its television picture-tube manufacturing line, resulting in the layoffs of about 400 local workers that reduced local employment to somewhat above 2,000.

However, Sony has been hiring locally for its newer consumer electronics products. Now, Clancy said, Sony Electronics employs about 2,400 people in Rancho Bernardo. And one of the goals of building the office tower is to provide an attractive environment to recruit more highly skilled workers, Clancy said.

Sony's current headquarters building will be converted into a company engineering center, Clancy said.

The new facilities will include community rooms that Sony will make available to local groups when Sony is not using them, Clancy said.

-- Contact staff writer Bradley J. Fikes at (760) 739-6641 or bfikes@nctimes.com.

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