L.A.’s oldest company is moving its headquarters to Orange County.

Aerospace manufacturer Ducommun Inc. – which has called Los Angeles County home for all but two of its 167 years – will relocate its office base from a manufacturing plant in Carson to a Santa Ana business park.

The move started several months ago, though it won’t be completed until next month, the company said.

Ducommun Chief Financial Officer Doug Groves said the transition had long been in the works as executives felt they could no longer scrape by using cramped offices in a manufacturing plant and instead sought Class A office space for the headquarters.

Ducommun, which reported $551 million in revenue last year, has 2,700 employees at 13 facilities across the United States, and at one plant each in Mexico and Thailand.

“We needed Class A office space near an airport that could host meetings of people from our various facilities and our customers,” Groves said.

He said the company found the best deal in Santa Ana, in an office building three miles from Orange County’s John Wayne Airport. The company has leased 15,000 square feet for a term of seven years.

Only the headquarters, which houses 40 full-time employees, is moving. Ducommun will still have L.A. County manufacturing plants in Carson, Gardena and Monrovia that employ a total of about 530 people.

The company had not yet publicized the move, but it was disclosed in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

Gold Rush roots

Ducommun, which claims the title as the oldest continually operating company in California, began as a watchmaker’s store founded by Charles Ducommun in downtown Los Angeles in 1849, just as the Gold Rush era started and one year before California became a state. Los Angeles had 1,600 residents at the time.

Charles Ducommun, who had just come to Los Angeles from Arkansas, immediately expanded his store to sell accessories for prospectors heading north to seek their fortunes in gold. The store sold general merchandise for the next 50 years.

Ducommun expanded into metal manufacturing in the early years of the 20th century, and by the 1920s it was supplying steel and other metals to the fledgling aerospace industry. Some Ducommun steel found its way into the Spirit of St. Louis, the plane that Charles Lindbergh flew solo over the Atlantic Ocean in 1927.

Ducommun converted almost all of its business to aerospace after World War II, split between the commercial and defense sectors.

The company now specializes in electrical and structural systems, with about 90 percent of its revenue coming from the aerospace sector, including big customers such as United Technologies Corp. based in Farmington, Conn., and France’s Airbus. The remaining 10 percent is from general industrial customers, including tractor makers Caterpillar Inc. and Deere & Co. of Peoria and Moline, Illinois, respectively.

Downtown departure

This isn’t the first time Ducommun has crossed the Orange Curtain.

The company left its downtown L.A. location in the late 1980s, moving its headquarters to Cypress in Orange County for two years, then back to L.A. County in Commerce before settling in Carson around 1990.

Those earlier shifts came as the company was trying to ride out a steep downturn in the defense sector as the Cold War wound down.

The latest headquarters move is a sign of an ongoing shift in the leading industries in Los Angeles, according to Fernando Guerra, director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University in Westchester.

“This is about the constant changing of the leading sector of the Los Angeles economy,” Guerra said. “Aerospace was the leading sector of the 1950s and 1960s; today the leading sector is technology and its tie-in with entertainment content. The newer sectors push out the older sectors.”

Guerra noted that Ducommun did not find a good deal for Class A office space around Los Angeles International Airport in part because Silicon Beach technology companies have taken up much of that space.

New chief

Ducommun is welcoming a new chief executive as it shifts to a new home.

Stephen Oswald, 53, started in January, replacing Anthony Reardon, who retired at age 66. Reardon had been chief executive since 2010.

Groves said the headquarters move had nothing to do with Oswald’s appointment as CEO, since the lease on the building in Santa Ana had already been signed.

“We had been planning this move for almost two years,” he said.

Groves said Oswald was unavailable for comment last week as he was in the process of moving from Minnesota to the L.A. area. Oswald had been chief executive of Capital Safety, a workplace safety equipment company based in Bloomington, Minn.

Groves said Oswald will lead a company presentation to investors this fall and at that time will lay out his vision for its future. The two are scheduled to host a conference call Thursday with the release of its second-quarter results.

Ducommun is coming off a weak first quarter, with net income of $2.1 million, down from $13.5 million a year earlier on revenue of $136 million, a drop from $142 million a year earlier. The company attributed the decline in revenue to the winding down of a regional jet program; the closure of some operations at its Tulsa, Okla., plant; and the sale of its Pittsburgh facility.