Datalogic, a bar-code scanner company that’s long been a major part of Eugene’s high-tech sector, has put its entire 32-acre west Eugene campus up for sale.
It’s the latest move by the financially struggling Italy-based company to scale back its Eugene presence.
If a buyer emerges for the two-building Terry Street campus, Datalogic could lease one of the buildings and consolidate all its workers there, leaving the other building available for a new occupant, says Lilly Storment, a broker at Evans Elder Brown & Seubert, which is marketing the property.
Datalogic isn’t publicly disclosing the asking price, but the Lane County assessor gives the whole campus a $16.3 million market value.
It’s unclear how many people Datalogic employs there. The company didn’t respond to questions from Eugene Weekly. But the operation has shrunk from its boom years, when the campus, totalling 108,000 square feet of buildings, was filled with many hundreds of workers developing and making bar-code scanners and related equipment.
Publicly traded Datalogic, with 2,700 employees and 26 locations worldwide, faces stagnant sales and profits, its reports show. Its stock, traded on European markets, has tanked to six euros, down 70 percent from 2020.
‘Rare landing pad’
Will anyone take the Eugene campus?
Matt Sayre, executive director of Collaborative Economic Development Oregon, a Eugene nonprofit working to attract businesses to Lane County, hopes so.
“This is one of the more significant industrial assets to come available in Lane County in some time,” Sayre tells Eugene Weekly. “Tech is one of our targeted sectors,” he says in an email. “An established research and development/production/office campus of this scale is a rare landing pad for the kind of higher-wage employer” Eugene seeks.
But Datalogic’s diminishing footprint here is a blow to Eugene’s efforts to brand itself as a high-tech hub.
Datalogic’s property joins a list of other big office/tech properties for sale here. These include the vacant 107,000-square-foot former HMT hard-drive disk factory in west Eugene and the vacant 160,000-square-foot former Royal Caribbean call center in Springfield. The former Hynix computer chip complex in west Eugene sits largely empty, and its adjacent 150 acres of vacant industrial-zoned land has been for sale for years. All are relics of an era when economic growth here centered on constructing huge buildings.
The Terry Street campus, built in 1980-84, has two buildings, each about 54,000 square feet, plus 12.5 vacant acres zoned for “campus employment.” It’s a pretty spot, flanked by federally owned wetlands and next to Amazon Creek and the Fern Ridge Path.
Boom and bust
The property’s history illustrates the booms and busts of the tech industry.
In 1979, Spectra-Physics, a California bar-code scanner and optical tech company, moved its scanner division HQ to Eugene and built the Terry Street complex. It became one of Lane County’s biggest tech employers, with 500-plus workers assembling and servicing scanners for retail customers, news reports said. The scanner business was booming.
In 1996, New York-based bar-code scanner company PSC Inc. bought Spectra-Physics’ scanner division, including the Terry Street real estate, for about $140 million.
Then a bust set in. PSC’s financials sagged. To raise cash, PSC in 1999 sold the campus to a New York company for $8.3 million, the deed shows. PSC stayed on as the tenant. In 2002, PSC entered and then emerged from bankruptcy reorganization.
In 2005, Datalogic bought PSC, including the Eugene operations — but not the Terry Street real estate — for $195 million. Datalogic remained at the complex as a tenant. But Datalogic cut scanner assembly work at the Eugene plant. It shifted hundreds of Eugene jobs to its plants in Vietnam and Italy, keeping the Terry Street facility mostly for research and development, news accounts say.
Buying, selling in Eugene
Yet, Datalogic splurged on Eugene real estate.
In 2007, it bought a luxury home on Riverwalk Loop near Valley River Center for $579,500, the deed shows. Possibly, that was to house company brass.
In 2016, Datalogic paid $1.1 million for 10 acres of vacant industrial land in the Greenhill Technology Park near the Terry Street complex, the deed shows, possibly for an expansion.
And in 2020, Datalogic bought the whole 32-acre Terry Street complex for $8.7 million from the New York owners, the deed shows.
Then, Datalogic’s finances began to sour — and the company reversed course on its Eugene real estate: It sold the Riverwalk Loop house in March 2024 for $825,000. In June 2024 it sold the vacant Greenhill tech park land for $1.4 million.
And in February of this year, it listed the entire Terry Street complex for sale.
High pay
Eugene-Springfield’s tech sector consists mostly of small to medium-sized businesses that pay well. Under the state’s definition of tech, which includes pharmaceutical and electronics manufacturing, software development, scientific research and the like, as of 2024 the county had 722 tech “establishments” with total payroll employment of 3,295, says Guy Tauer, the state’s regional economist covering Lane County. That’s an average of under five employees per establishment. Tech wages average $109,000 a year, he says.
Bricks $ Mortar is a column anchored by Christian Wihtol, who worked as an editor and writer at The Register-Guard in Eugene 1990-2018, much of the time focused on real estate, economic development and business. Reach him at Christian@EugeneWeekly.com.
Comments are closed.