MORE redundancies have been announced at Oxford Instruments, where orders have been hit by the strong pound and the economic crisis in Asia, writes Maggie Hartford

Five people at Industrial Analysis, in Abingdon, have been given formal redundancy notices and six temporary staff have been told they won't be kept on.

Oxford Instruments chief executive Andrew Mackintosh said: "The consultation process has started with five employees with a view to finding spaces elsewhere in the group."

He added: "We have also slimmed down by natural wastage - people haven't been replaced - but that really was not enough to get the business into the right shape, given current economic conditions." The announcement comes just days after three people were made redundant by another subsidiary of Oxford Instruments, Accelerator Technology, which employs about 100 at Osney Mead, Oxford.

Another ten people at Accelerator Technology have not had their temporary contracts renewed and two people have been transferred to other divisions of the group, which employs several thousand in Oxfordshire.

Industrial Analysis has just moved into a pioneering £5.5m "green" building in Abingdon.

Dr Mackintosh said the strong pound and weakening of demand in Asia had caught up with them.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.