The Crown Audio manufacturing plant and office in Elkhart is closing, about a year after the company announced that manufacturing would move to Mexico.
Crown Audio was founded in Elkhart in the 1940’s. The company, which makes amplifiers, was acquired by Harman International in 2000.
The plant in Elkhart will close completely in a phase out that Harmon spokesperson David Glaubke said should be complete by next June. About 115 jobs at the plant will be lost.
Glaubke said they built the company over several years and are now trying to make it more efficient and closing the Elkhart plant is part of a downsizing and consolidation.
“Over the past ten years plus we’ve acquired many brands under our portfolio and this is part of a several year process in consolidating and restructuring our operations,” he said.
Glaubke said manufacturing that used to be done in Elkhart is now done overseas.
“We’ve blended the products to turn them into a unified one Harman solution. Within that construct we begin developing redundancies across the organization and inefficiencies that we wanted to correct as an organization,” he said.
Research and development for the products is being moved to their other locations in Denmark, California and Texas.