Seagate will close its Suzhou plant and ax more than 2,000 employees, the data storage company revealed in a statement.
Seagate will carry out the layoff earlier than its original announcement. The company referred to the "continuous operating efficiency optimization" as the main reason behind the early closure of the Suzhou plant.
It said that it will offer compensation to the affected workers, according to the China's Labor Contract Law. Staff turnover ends today, Jan. 18, China Tech News reported.
With the shutdown, Seagate intends to reduce its manufacturing scale in line with existing and future demand.
The layoff is said to be a part of the company's restructuring plan announced last year, Kelly Zhang, Seagate's spokesperson, told local reporters.
In July 2016, the company revealed that it would lay off 6,500 employees by 2017, which accounted for 14 percent of its total personnel, per China Tech News.
Seagate's business has been affected by the slump in PC sales, where it gets most of its clients.
According to the Hindu Business Line, the employees were told that they would lose their jobs within a week's time.
"At the very least, the company should hold a meeting with us workers. They should make clear to us how compensation will be dealt with, at what point wages will be cut off, and whether the company is being relocated or shut down," a laid-off worker told state-funded news outlet the Paper, via the Business Line.
Some employees also claimed that layoffs have been happening since February of last year.
The Suzhou plant was established in 2014 and is situated in Suzhou city. It is one of the two factories Seagate owns in China.
For the past few years, the company has been trying to counter the slowdown in PC sales by introducing new models and ramping up production of solid state disks.
Last year, it introduced what was billed as the "world's largest SSD." At 60TB, the Seagate SSD is said to be four times larger than Samsung's highest-capacity disk.