Oakland-based Pandora Media said Wednesday that it will cut 5 percent of its workforce and expand its business in Atlanta, because the Southern city is more cost effective than growing the brand in the East Bay.
Pandora’s decision to expand operations in Atlanta feeds speculation about tech companies’ intention to move further away from Silicon Valley (and California generally). Business costs in the area alone have gone up due to the state’s well-established compliance burden, not to mention real estate values. Workers in the tech sector are feeling the pain, too […]
Nestle’s decision to move hundreds of jobs out of California promises to fuel reflection among Bay Area business and civic leaders on the challenges of operating in California, with its high-priced housing and traffic congestion.
A maker of lithium batteries is promising to provide an economic jolt to the Appalachian region, announcing plans Friday to relocate from California to Kentucky and build a factory employing hundreds of workers in an area reeling from the coal industry’s decline. EnerBlu Inc. announced it will invest $372 million and create 875 full-time jobs in eastern Kentucky with the production facility in Pikeville. The company also will move its headquarters from Riverside, California, bringing another $40 million investment and 110 administrative, research-and-development and executive jobs to Lexington, Kentucky’s second-largest city.
Ford Motor Co. plans to produce a future electric car in Mexico rather than make it in the U.S., reversing plans announced in January to make its Flat Rock, Mich., assembly plant near Detroit its main electric-vehicle production site.
A New York hedge fund that earlier this year flipped the board of Depomed Inc. and installed a new CEO to boost the company’s value said Monday that it will cut 40 percent of its staff and move the drug company’s headquarters out of California.
The move is necessary, Newark-based Depomed (NASDAQ: DEPO) said in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, because it is turning over sales of its pain drug Nucynta to Collegium Pharmaceutical Inc. and won’t need as large of a workforce or space.
Aerospace employment in Los Angeles County dropped by 3,000 jobs, or about 6 percent, to 51,000 between 2014 and 2016, according to a report released Monday from the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp.
Most of the job losses were in aircraft manufacturing, which fell by 2,200, due in part to the closing of Boeing Co.’s Long Beach plant which built the C-17 Globemaster III cargo plane. That resulted in about 400 layoffs at the end of 2015, according to news stories.
The aerospace job losses were partially offset by a gain of 500 jobs in aircraft parts, engines and guided missiles, as well as space vehicles, due to the expansion of Space Exploration Technologies Corp. in Hawthorne.
“The storage battery is, in my opinion, a catchpenny, a sensation, a mechanism for swindling the public by stock companies,” wrote Thomas Edison in 1883.
Today, the battery industry is mustering for exponential growth as car makers electrify their fleets, most visibly at Tesla ’s $5 billion factory in Nevada. For investors looking to gain from the battery’s rise, though, the doubts of the 19th-century entrepreneur linger. The path to profitability is far from clear.
Canadian behemoth franchisor MTY Food Group Inc. agreed to acquire the franchisors of the Counter and Built upscale burger chain brands for an undisclosed amount, MTY announced today. The company expects the deal to close next month. . . The offices of the two limited liability corporations running the franchises will move to Scottsdale, Ariz., MTY said. MTY’s Kahala Group subsidiary, acquired last year, is also based in Scottsdale. Kahala’s holdings include Pinkberry, Cold Stone Creamery and Baja Fresh, among others.
Luxury electric carmaker Tesla this week acquired a small, Minnesota-based factory automation company, in hopes of fixing unexpected bottlenecks on its Model 3 production line. Perbix launched in 1976 and employs 150 people in a suburb north of Minneapolis. Tesla said it’s worked with the engineering firm for nearly three years, on a number of projects on the production line at its Fremont car factory and its Gigafactory in Reno. Terms of the deal were not immediately released.
Virtual Guard Inc. will receive about $251,505 in tax abatements and is estimated to generate about $17.1 million in new tax revenue over 10 years. Virtual Guard is a video monitoring company, which plans to relocate its headquarters from Los Angeles, California to a location in Clark County as early as later this year, citing an “unfriendly economic environment” in California in its tax abatement application. The company plans to hire 80 new employees within its first two years of operations, making an average hourly wage of $22.31. The company plans to rent or buy an existing facility, ranging from 5,000 to 10,000 square feet depending on whether the space is leased or bought. Virtual Guard is slated to make a capital investment of just under $356,000, according to its tax abatement application. . . . ERG Aerospace Corp. will receive about $330,288 in tax abatements and is estimated to generate about $3.2 million in new tax revenue over 10 years. The company, researches, designs, develops and manufactures materials and components for the aerospace, national defense, semiconductor manufacturing, biotech, and other high technology industries. ERG currently has facilities in Oakland, California, and Sparks. The company plans to relocate its current operations in Oakland, California, to Nevada and subsequently make Nevada its headquarters. The company plans to invest over $2.1 million in capital equipment for their new facility, and plans to hire 13 employees during their first year of operations at an average wage of $30.92 per hour.
Charles Schwab is emblematic. Since announcing its relocation strategy in early 2013, the company has shrunk its San Francisco headquarters to fewer than 1,300 people, a 45% decrease. Its 47-acre campus south of Denver is now Schwab’s largest office, employing almost 4,000 people. An expanded office in Austin, Texas, will be completed next year, and construction is under way on a new location near Dallas.
. . . While the finance industry has been relocating entry-level jobs since the late 1980s, today’s moves are claiming higher-paid jobs in human resources, compliance and asset management, chipping away at New York City’s middle class, said Kathryn Wylde, president and chief executive of the Partnership for New York City, a nonprofit that represents the city’s business leadership.
Meanwhile, Sacramento’s Aerojet puts its projected annual savings at $230 million for simply leaving California.
It was good of Aerojet to release this number. Expect only platitudes from others. For example, being in Texas will allow Kubota to respond “more quickly” to market changes and “streamline its operations for both dealer and consumer benefit.”
The company [SOLiD] moved into the Sunnyvale space just four years ago, excitedly touting the space then as its new U.S. headquarters and a place to grow. In an interview, an executive cites the Bay Area’s expensive real estate as one reason for the move to Texas.
Faraday Future is running on fumes. But it’s still running. The Gardena-based luxury electric car start-up raised $14 million in emergency funding and will lease an old factory near Fresno that will enable it to turn out 10,000 cars a year. The company has dramatically lowered its ambitions. Its goal now is to try to remain solvent enough to start manufacturing and selling the FF 91, a powerful, technology-packed luxurious electric sedan with a base price expected to top $100,000. As recently as last year, the company had plans to turn out 150,000 cars a year from a massive new $5-billion assembly plant near Las Vegas.