Shipley-based wireless communications firm Filtronic has axed jobs in a bid to cut costs and warned about reduced trading in the second half of its financial year and into 2012.

The company, which has a small head office in Shipley, a mobile technology arm in Leeds and operations at Darlington, is believed to have cut its North-East workforce by 15 people.

In an interim management statement, Filtronic said its business had been damaged by faster-than-expected phasing out of older equipment by customers in its point-to-point communications arm.

It said the trend would provide new opportunities and bring changes to its product mix over the next 18 months.

The business was also adjusting to the negative impact of the takeover of a major customer, Nera Networks, which had resulted in a sharper than expected fall in orders.

Filtronic said transformation of the point-to-point business strategy was ‘gaining traction’ with the first orders for an electronic radar system. Initial orders had also been secured for radio modules and volume production was also under way for new customers.

Isotek, the Leeds-based mobile phone technology company acquired in November, had been hit by delays in some customer programmes.

Isotek, which employs 25 staff, was well-placed to participate in several key programmes, especially in the United States where it had been selected by Alcatel-Lucent as a supplier to key customers such as telecommunications giant AT&T.

Filtronic said integration of the Isotek and point-to-point businesses was being accelerated. Business development activity was being expanded and capacity for meeting new opportunities for filtering products were being scaled up.

Group sales were projected to grow from £16 million for the whole of 2011 to around £25 million for 2012.

It said: “Further consolidation is continuing in the wireless telecomm market at all levels of the value chain, but both original equipment manufacturers and network operators see significant market opportunities arising from the rapid growth in mobile data traffic.

“Filtronic believes that its investment in 4G enabling hardware technology is well timed to address these opportunities.”