Key Tronic Corp, Spokane, Washington is resigned to continued price-cutting in the computer industry keeping its earnings for the current first quarter flat with year-ago results, Stanley Hiller, chief executive told Dow Jones & Co: the keyboard king is busy integrating its complementary business acquired from Honeywell Inc for $30m – which bought about $70m of annual sales;Key Tronic has decided to close the Honeywell El Paso, Texas facility and move some of those operations to its Spokane plant and to Honeywell’s plant in Juarez, Mexico; the European inventory facility will be combined with Key Tronic’s operations in Ireland, and Key Tronic is revamping some aspects of its Irish operations the better to meet the needs of customers in Europe, which is now beginning the same period of price-cutting and market expansion going on in the US; Key Tronic also plans to introduce new input devices such as pen and speech recognition systems, which carry higher profit margins; some of the new products will be at Comdex/Fall.
