Sonoma County is home to 40 largely unknown but highly successful specialty manufacturers

The company sits by a prominent corner of the Windsor Town Green, but few Sonoma County residents know that the local office of Swiss manufacturer Stäubli has overseen the production of more than 1 billion connectors used for solar electric panels.

“We are the No. 1 connection company in the world for solar power,” said Ian Pratt, the division’s CEO.

The division, formerly known as Multi-Contact USA, is one of 40 specialty manufacturers in the county, said Dick Herman, president of 101 MFG, a Petaluma-based alliance of manufacturing executives in Northern California. The components from those companies are used in everything from Tesla electric cars to military aircraft, medical instruments to test devices for tablet computers.

“These 40 are the backbone, or the brain trust, of how we build today’s high-tech products” in the county, Herman wrote in an email.

Most of those companies are small, but they include the local divisions of such global players as Keysight Technologies, Viavi Solutions and Medtronic.

It’s a sector that has undergone significant downsizing since the start of the new millennium. At that time both telecom companies and Agilent Technologies, the precursor here to Keysight, employed thousands of production workers.

In 2001, about 20,000 workers had jobs in durable goods manufacturing here. Today, the sector employs about 7,800. The numbers declined more than 15 percent since the recession officially ended in June 2009, according to the state Employment Development Department.

“Though the 2001 tech bust swept away much of the county’s high-tech manufacturing base, surviving plants are highly automated and specialize in high-value production,” said a December 2016 report by Moody’s Analytics prepared for the Sonoma County Economic Development Board. The report noted that the county’s tech producers had benefited less from the Bay Area’s tech boom than those in Oakland and Marin counties.

Herman said successful companies have used advanced software and automation to greatly boost their workers’ output.

“Over the last 10 years, an employee had to become twice as productive,” he said.

Ben Stone, executive director of the county’s Economic Development Board, said the manufacturers remain a significant part of the local economy. Their workers are among the best paid of any sector, and such companies often “spur innovation” by virtue of employees leaving to start new tech businesses.

In past centuries, physical and financial capital helped propel industries, Stone said. “For this era, it’s really intellectual capital.”

Featured here are three of the county’s lesser-known component makers:

Stäubli

When solar panel production soared a decade ago, the local division of Stäubli found an opportunity to provide junction boxes and connectors needed to get the electricity to homes and businesses. That led to growth in production and employment.

“We added so many people we needed a new building,” said Carlos Groth, a senior designer. About six years ago, the company moved into its Market Street office and production facility across from the Windsor Town Green.

Each Stäubli connector includes a spring-like louvered contact made of a copper alloy coated with silver or gold. The louvers’ multiple surfaces allow more area for electrical contact, giving them the ability to transfer more power than a normal connector of the same size.

“That’s our claim to fame,” said production supervisor Ernie Ueng. Last week he oversaw a crew of a dozen workers making solar panel mount connectors. The crew can make up to 20,000 such connectors a week, he said.

Larger volumes of connectors are made in a company plant in North Carolina.

Outside of solar, the company’s connectors are used in data centers and cell towers, as well as in the health care field for MRI machines and devices that activate patients’ pacemakers. Other areas that use the components include food processing and the test and measurement businesses.

Stäubli has about 60 employees in the county, but hopes to grow to over 70 in the next year, said Pratt, the CEO.

For the future, the company sees continued opportunities in the energy sector.

“It’s a perfect marriage for us,” Pratt said.

Stäubli, a family-owned company with 4,500 employees, this month announced a partnership with Swiss company Power-Blox to offer modular energy storage systems for solar system owners. Groth said the storage systems will be compatible with connectors from the local division.

KG Technologies

When the northeast U.S. was hit by a 2003 power outage that affected 50 million people, utilities began turning to smart meters in order to better manage their electrical grids, said KG Technologies President/CEO Erik Zhang.

A key feature of smart meters is their ability to remotely turn on or off electricity to a home or business. And Cotati-based KG makes the relay, or switch, that enables the meter to allow or limit power use.

The business, founded in 1999, came to the county in 2010 and was purchased in 2015 by China-based relay manufacturer Hongfa, the company that had long been manufacturing KG’s relays.

KG is the largest relay supplier for smart meters outside of China, where Hongfa is the dominant relay maker, Zhang said.

With smart meters, the world’s utilities can reduce the amount of power customers consume at peak times. That allows energy suppliers to limit how much they must expand power production.

“It literally is the difference between building a new power plant or not,” said Steven Layton, the company’s vice president of sales and marketing.

The meters also provide the means for consumers to prepay for their power and for companies to shut down power when the money runs out or a bill goes unpaid.

With some relays, magnetism moves their contacts to form or break a circuit to start or end the flow of power. But KG’s devices are known as “latching relays,” where the physical contacts always remain fixed in place and a small pulse of electricity turns the switch “on” or “off.” The company maintains its relays provide a more reliable method in devices that must last many years.

“You’ve got to make sure that when you need to switch it, it’s going to work,” Zhang said.

The local business employs 17 people in Cotati and global field offices. This year, it will reach about $60 million in sales, a growth of about 40 percent in two years, Zhang said.

And last week, KG broke ground for a new 10,000-square-foot facility in Rohnert Park, an event that drew top Hongfa executives from China.

SRC Haverhill

SRC Haverhill makes coaxial cables similar to those used to connect a home television to Comcast. But its cables are used in F-16 fighter jets, the body scanning machines at airport security and in test equipment used by those assembling Apple’s iPads.

The company, based on Skylane Boulevard near the Charles M. Schulz-Sonoma County Airport, makes flexible cables, semi-rigid cables and crush-proof cables. It also produces iron oxide-infused “absorber” pieces that act like a sponge to protect electronic devices from unwanted microwaves.

Its biggest cables have an inner wire of a quarter-inch in diameter; the smallest have one slightly thicker than a human hair.

The company is one of five in the nation that are qualified to supply semi-rigid coaxial cable components for the U.S. military, general manager Dan Hirschnitz said.

In 1990, Hirschnitz joined SRC Cable, which his father founded to provide components to the local Hewlett-Packard facilities. Two years later, he took over as president.

The company has weathered the ups and downs of the tech economy, with the worst downturn coming from the 2001 dot-com bust. The number of workers fell then from 67 to about 10, and Hirschnitz had to sell the company’s building to remain in business.

It was, he recalled, “a brutal time.”

But the business survived, and in 2013 Hirschnitz sold it to Winchester Electronics, a global supplier of cables and connectors based in South Norwalk, Connecticut. He remained on as general manager as the new division was combined with a company from Haverhill, Massachusetts, and renamed SRC Haverhill.

Today it employs 23 workers in Santa Rosa.

New technology is creating new demand for cable components, he said. The opportunities include parts for the internet/entertainment systems that commercial airlines are placing on their aircraft, as well as new wireless connectivity for automobiles.

But Hirschnitz said military applications may remain the biggest growth area. The U.S. government wants to ensure it keeps readily at hand the components it needs for the nation’s defense.

“That’s the one thing that won’t be done offshore,” he said.

You can reach Staff Writer Robert Digitale at 707-521-5285 or robert.digitale@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @rdigit.