ABOUT 100 staff at a Yarnton office are facing being made redundant after US-based life sciences company Agilent Technologies decided to stop manufacturing one of its products.

Neil Rees, Agilent’s country managing director for the UK, said the company had notified staff of the redundancies after announcing it was pulling out of making NMR spectrometers last October.

NMR spectrometers involve giant magnets that can weigh up to 20 tonnes and cause atoms or cells to vibrate, enabling the measurement of molecular structures.

He said the firm was currently in discussions with hundreds of customers around the world that had purchased NMR equipment and would not know how many staff would be retained until this process was completed.

He anticipated it would take another one or two months.

Mr Rees said: “We are talking to our customers and working out what sort of support they want, and for how long, and who they want it from.”

Customers include universities, research laboratories and hospitals.

He said Agilent was offering continued support to customers for up to seven years, for NMR machines that were up to 40 years old.

“Our intent is that we will continue to have a presence at the Yarnton site in the foreseeable future,” he added.

Before the October announcement, Agilent had about 120 staff working at its Yarnton office at the Oxford Industrial Park. They ranged across NMR support, sales, administration, finance and legal.

Mr Rees said that over the past six months some staff had left Yarnton, although he would not quantify how many. He added once the customer review was finished, he expected there would be “maybe two dozen, possibly less than a dozen” staff remaining at Yarnton.

Some of them would be for NMR repairs, as well as sales and finance for other Agilent businesses.

“We are winding down,” he said.