Budapest - The US-based circuit board manufacturer Jabil Circuit is to lay off 900 workers at its plant in Hungary, the firm revealed on Wednesday.

Jabil, which currently employs some 4,000 in Hungary, told the local news agency MTI that its decision was due to falling orders.

The news came the day after Hungary's official economic statistics office forecast that 105,000 jobs would be lost this year.

Of these, 12,000 will be in the automotive sector and 10,000 in construction. Anna Adamecz, a department head at Ecostat, said that 60 per cent of redundancies will be due to falling demand in export markets.

This forecast is based on the assumption that the Hungarian economy will shrink by 2.4 per cent this year. More jobs could be lost if the recession is deeper.

The Hungarian central bank said this week that it expects the economy to slide by 3.5 per cent this year and remain in recession until well into 2010.

The Hungarian news website Index has a running counter of job losses attributable to the economic crisis since the shock waves hit the region in October last year.

The Jabil lay-offs brought the number of jobs lost since October up to 29,332, of which almost 2,500 were announced in the first three days of this week alone. (dpa)