Sun steps up Scottish plant activity

Sun Microsystems has been given the go ahead to build a £25m extension to its West Lothian plant and create 200 new jobs.

The extension, which will double the size of the plant, will be used purely for manufacturing to deal with Sun's Solution Integration strategy.

Iona McCullagh, regional marketing manager for Scotland at Sun, pointed out that this move is part of a worldwide strategy.

She said: "The aim of the Solutions Integration strategy is for Sun to understand what its key customers need. Instead of shipping boxes to a site, along with an engineer to install the system, we will build the system in the plant, to the customer's configuration, and then ship so it's ready to plug and play."

Planning permission has been received from West Lothian Council for the 140,000 sq ft extension and the project is due for completion by July 2001.

The Scottish manufacturing plant already produces a wide range of products, including servers, workstations and network systems.

The 200 jobs will be for highly skilled engineers and technicians.