Apr. 11—THIEF RIVER FALLS, Minn. — City leaders say they don't know much about the job transfers going on at DigiKey, but don't have any concerns about them.
The transfers are a normal thing for the company, City Administrator Angie Philipp said.
"It's normal practice for them to send some other IT, calling stuff to India," she said. "It's their business practice."
DigiKey, a distributor of technical components and automation products, said in a statement sent to the Grand Forks Herald that it has outpaced Thief River Falls' local workforce market, and has decided to transition some of its data management, quotes and operations work to its Global Capability Center in India. Around 85 team members are impacted by this decision, the statement said, and will be offered different roles to which they can transfer their expertise.
"DigiKey regularly realigns our teams as the business evolves," the statement said. "Beyond the reassigned roles, we are actively trying to fill 100-200 job openings in Thief River Falls at any given time."
The company previously celebrated more than 3,600 new Thief River Falls
employees in October
, and announced it had shipped
one million packages
from its Product Distribution Center expansion in November.
Thief River Falls Mayor Brian Holmer said he doesn't have any concerns about the change and understands that a large corporation like DigiKey has to cover its overseas business.
"It was a business decision and I don't think it's going to affect our community too much," he said. "We're one of the communities that's got a lot more jobs available than we do people."
DigiKey said in the statement that it is still a U.S.-based company, though with its global customer base it will have a global team to provide local support.
The Thief River Falls Chamber of Commerce declined to comment on the transfers.