DATE: Friday, October 10, 1997              TAG: 9710100681

SECTION: BUSINESS                PAGE: D1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY AKWELI PARKER, STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:   59 lines

NEWPORT NEWS VIDEO PROJECTOR MANUFACTURER LAYS OFF 16 WORKERSTHIS ONCE-THRIVING COMPANY IS FINDING IT HARD TO COMPETE IN A GROWING MARKET.

Newport News-based nVIEW Corp., a maker of computer screen and video projectors, handed pink slips to 16 workers, who were given two weeks' notice Monday, the company said.

The move underscores the once-thriving company's efforts to survive in a market that has in the past few years become overgrown with bigger and faster competition.

``The layoff cut across the entire company and all layers of the company,'' said Lu Ann Klevecz, an nVIEW spokeswoman.

Klevecz said one of the downsizing victims was a company officer, although she did not specify who it was. Angelo ``Gus'' Guastaferro remains chairman, president and CEO.

The company doesn't foresee any more layoffs and plans to start hiring next year, Klevecz said. The bloodletting claimed about 17 percent, or one-out-of-six, nVIEW workers. The last big round of reductions at nVIEW was in January of 1996, when the company severed 15 percent of its staff.

After a promising, profitable fourth quarter in 1996, the company was disappointed by losses the first two quarters and will likely be in the red for this quarter.

Huge inventories, the highly cyclical nature of the business and getting knocked around by industry brutes such as Sony and Panasonic have all taken their toll on the now 80-worker company.

``What you see in the industry is `smaller and brighter,' '' said Rodney Coronel, an account manager for the Whitlock Group in Virginia Beach. Based in Richmond, Whitlock offers video solutions, including nVIEW projectors.

As in the computer industry, said Coronel, obsolescence comes quickly.

In nVIEW's annual 10-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company unabashedly blamed its sales woes on price-slashing rivals whose mission is to dump their inventories and make way for newer models.

At the end of trading Thursday, nVIEW stock was near a record-low $1.50, compared to a 52-week high of $5.90 last October.

Outgunned by the Japanese giants and big European outfits like Norway's ASK ASA, nVIEW is repositioning its strategic sights.

The company will do less business in the shark-infested market for ``black boxes,'' industry parlance for standalone projectors.

Although it will still make and sell projectors, the company's recovery strategy focuses on a concept called ``vertical markets.'' Products are value-added components of a larger system instead of the end-product itself.

An example: nVIEW is working with one company that builds home theater systems. In one configuration, the living-room bookshelf doubles as a movie screen; an nVIEW projector, recessed in the coffee table, beams the movie or TV show onto the screen.

The company is considering other new money-making avenues as well - like contracting its manufacturing services to other companies. What rolls off the assembly line won't necessarily have to be projectors either, said Klevecz.

With its efforts at diversification and recent ISO 9001 certification - a tough-to-get manufacturing pedigree conferred by an international standards body - perhaps the manufacturer will be able once again to project profits. KEYWORDS: LAYOFFS

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