Canton, Ohio-based Timken Company, parent of the Timken Roller Bearing Plant in Gaffney, announced Wednesday it is selling one of its lines of business that includes operations in Greenville.

The news that Timken was selling its needle roller bearing business to Japan-based JTEKT Corporation came the same day the company released its second quarter earnings, which showed the company lost $64.5 million in the last three-month period.

The company acknowledged in its earnings report the recession has not yet hit bottom.

"While the economic outlook continues to remain uncertain, the company expects the impact of the global recession to be greater than previously anticipated, due not only to the depth and breadth of decline across end-markets, but also the compounding factor of inventory destocking throughout the supply chain," according to the outlook section of the report.

The sale of the needle bearing business will impact five Timken plants in the United States including two in South Carolina (Greenville and Walhalla) as well as three in Georgia (Cairo, Dahlonega, and Sylvania). The sale also impacts nine other plants located in Canada, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Spain and China.

JTEKT is buying the needle bearing business from Timken for $330 million in cash. The deal is expected to close at the end of 2009, Timken officials said in a press release confirming the sale, which had been reported earlier in the week by a Japan-based financial daily.

"This transaction is a major step forward in our strategy to transform our portfolio to focus on industrial sectors with strong aftermarkets," Timken's President and Chief Executive, James W. Griffith, said in a prepared release announcing the sale.

Timken's needle bearing business line employs about 3,400.

The Timken plant in Gaffney employs about 700 currently, a company spokeswoman confirmed in an e-mail. It is one of Cherokee County's largest employers.

"We have decreased manufacturing output in response to lower demand and are on track in our efforts to right-size the company," the chief executive said in the prepared release. "We have positioned the company well, and are confident that we will see stronger structural profitability as markets stabilize."

The company said in its financial release that the "majority" of its actions to "realign the organization and reduce overhead, staffing levels and administrative costs" were completed in the second quarter.