A long-established glazing firm battling for survival in the downturn has laid off another 24 workers.

Marsland and Co, an Edenbridge-based window and door manufacturer since 1959, axed 25 jobs earlier in the year.

Now a second round of redundancies has claimed a further 24 jobs, virtually halving the workforce in a year from 75 to 38.

Several staff left the Edenbridge headquarters on Thursday and more will be gone by Christmas. A few more are due to leave by the end of January. Two staff opted for voluntary redundancy.

The latest job cuts do not affect Marsland’s domestic operation which is said to be trading well and planning to open retail outlets in Tonbridge and Tunbridge Wells.

Earlier this year, Desmond High and Martin Stanton, Maidstone-based directors of EMC Corporate Finance, were called in to the company to sort things out.

They hoped the first round of redundancies would be enough to stem losses - but the economic slump in the past two months has accelerated the pace of change as orders in the building industry dry up.

Mr Stanton, chief executive, said: "Until early autumn, we though we were relatively immune from the market downturn, as the demand for our core business - windows and doors for the refurbishment of social housing and local authority premises - had been holding up well.

"However, turbulence in the finance markets in the last two months has seen confidence evaporate, and the large contractors who represent our customer base anticipate significantly reduced demand in 2009."

There was over-capacity in the sector, he said, and Marlsand was not prepared to tender for jobs with margins that made no commercial sense.

"We could continue to bid for work regardless of profitability but this is something Marlsand has been doing for too long and contributed to the substantial losses we have incurred in the last three to four years."

Mr High, joint chairman, added: "The board has reluctantly decided that to survive as a business, we need to go down to what is, in effect, a hibernation mode, with a reduced workforce and overheads."

Marsland’s annual turnover was likely to fall to around £4m, he said, from £9m typically achieved in recent years. Directors were not immune from the cutbacks, and had taken "significant" pay cuts.