Lockheed plans to sell portion of its campus

By Sam Scott

Sunnyvale's biggest employer announced last week that it will sell a valuable chunk of its vast north Sunnyvale campus. Within the coming year, Lockheed Martin Corporation plans to sell 85 acres, approximately 18 percent of its Sunnyvale land, says Catherine Strehl, a spokesperson for the company.

It is a move likely to incite significant interest from developers keen to cater to growing tech companies. By the new light rail line, not far from the proposed Yahoo! campus, the land has already begun to attract buyers.

"We've already had a lot of calls," Strehl says. The land could well go for prices in excess of $1 million an acre, she says.

The land comes in two parcels--one 79 acres, the other six. The properties run along Mathilda Avenue between Fifth and Eleventh Avenues, Strehl says.

The Tasman corridor is home to a series of tech-high-flyers from Cisco to Network Appliance to (in all likelihood) Yahoo!

The sale accompanies Lockheed's plans to reduce the Sunnyvale work force by roughly 400, a cut that will take its numbers to just over 7000. In the mid '80s, at the height of the Cold War, Strehl says 25,000 people worked at Lockheed facilities in the valley.

"This reflects the downturn in the defense industry."

Selling the land, she says, liquidates an unneeded asset.

"We're sizing the facility to what our business base is and what our employee base is," she says.

The local cuts are part of nationwide downsizing by the Maryland-based company. Strehl says the worldwide Lockheed work force will fall 2,500 over the year. Currently, she says it numbers approximately 140,000.

The S&P-500 company has struggled of late. As of last Thursday, the stock price stood at less than half its 52-week high.

Even with the promised cuts, Lockheed remains Sunnyvale's largest source of jobs. According to Dan Rich, Sunnyvale's spokesperson, Lockheed accounts for more than 7000 jobs, putting it easily in first place in that category. Rich says its closest rival, Advanced Micro Devices, generates around 2500 jobs.

The city, however, is by no means as reliant on the company for its financial well-being as it once was. Early last decade, a constriction in the defense industry caused a recession in the local economy, Karen Davis, an economist with the city says.

"In the early '90s, throughout the region, we were very dependent on the defense industry," she says. "We worked hard to diversify the economy so that a downturn in any one area doesn't have the same impact."

Strehl says that Lockheed, which has had presence in Sunnyvale since 1955, is not in danger of leaving the city.

"The good news in this story is that it's pretty clear that the decision been made not to close Sunnyvale," she says. "We're just going to have to win new business."

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