TECHNOLOGY giant Agilent today announced that 200 employees in Ipswich would lose their jobs.The plant on the Whitehouse Industrial estate will be put up for sale and the remaining 50 members of staff will move to a new location.

TECHNOLOGY giant Agilent today announced that 200 employees in Ipswich would lose their jobs.

The plant on the Whitehouse Industrial estate will be put up for sale and the remaining 50 members of staff will move to a new location.

However, a spokeswoman could not confirm if the new site would be in Ipswich and could only say that the location would be "local".

The decision was announced to members of staff this afternoon and poor financial results have been blamed.

Financial results for the first half of the year had been lower than expected forcing the company to make redundancies.

Agilent is a global company and the Ipswich site will close to consolidate its Singapore branch which has "the capacity to do the job at a lower cost".