Newbury-based company Grass Valley heading to Canada

Town site "not in line with our future vision"

A NEWBURY-based tech company is proposing to make a number of redundancies as it looks to move its operations to Canada.

Grass Valley, which took over Snell Advanced Media, a company formed by the amalgamation of Snell and Quantel, is based in the Turnpike building where television production and broadcasting equipment has been manufactured for nearly 40 years.

The company said it had identified the Newbury facility as “one of the sites whose operating costs and/or business benefit, were not in line with our future vision”.

In an email to employees, seen by the Newbury Weekly News, the company said: “To address our overcapacity in manufacturing resulting from the industry transition and customers’ changing buying patterns, we have formally begun the consolidation of all manufacturing activities in Newbury into our underutilized manufacturing in Montreal.”

Grass Valley will continue to provide repair services in Newbury.

However it said that “Newbury employees outside of manufacturing and related functions would also be affected as we propose to shift more roles to work from home, consolidate jobs into regional Centers of Excellence or otherwise make some roles redundant”.

The company said it expected the transition to be completed by September 2021.

It added: “We must adapt to the changing industry and to our customers’ changing needs in order to remain a strong, industry-leading, cloud-first solutions provider.

“Optimizing our workforce and creating a sustainable cost structure are key steps in making this happen.”

Quantel was a pioneer manufacturer of television and film production equipment that is used by broadcasters and movie makers worldwide.

Its special effects systems made many global blockbuster movies possible and the company won a number of industry awards, including 10 Emmys, as well as nine Queen’s Awards.

Quantel was formed in 1973, with the backing of Micro Consultants, a Newbury-based signal processing manufacturer based in West Mills and founded by Sir Peter Michael and Bob Graves. It moved to the Turnpike Road site in 1981.

In 2014, Quantel announced that it had bought Snell for an undisclosed figure and the company later merged to become known as Snell Advanced Media (SAM).

In February 2018, SAM was acquired by Grass Valley.

Grass Valley’s Newbury HQ in Turnpike Road was originally built in the mid-1940s by the Ministry of Defence as part of the war effort.