North Texas primed to corral more corporate relocations heading into 2022
By Bill Hethcock – Senior Reporter, Dallas Business Journal
Photo by Glen Carrie on Unsplash
You win some, you lose some.
Big companies, including infrastructure engineering giant AECOM (NYSE: ACM), continued to move their corporate headquarters to North Texas in 2021. AECOM, with a market cap of about $10 billion, relocated its global headquarters from Los Angeles to Dallas, becoming the sixth Fortune 500 company to move its home base to DFW in the past six years, according to a scorecard maintained by the Dallas Regional Chamber.
But Rivian Automotive (Nasdaq: RIVN), the newly public California-based electric-vehicle maker gunning to swerve into the market share of Tesla, picked a site in Georgia over Fort Worth for a $5 billion manufacturing site.
Overall, North Texas continued to corral more than its fair share of corporate headquarters relocations and other major company expansions in 2021 — many of them from California, as per recent tradition.
And the outlook for 2022 seems more promising than ever for North Texas, COVID be damned, said Dale Petroskey, president and CEO of the Dallas Regional Chamber.
The regional chamber is tracking 111 projects that are strongly considering a relocation to DFW — more than four times the 25 projects on the chamber’s radar in the months before the pandemic hit the U.S., Petroskey said at an early December luncheon for the economic development and business recruitment group.
“We are more attractive now than we were before,” he said.
Statewide, however, Austin outperformed DFW in corporate relocations in 2021, headlined by the headquarters move of electric car manufacturer Tesla Inc.(Nasdaq: TSLA) from Palo Alto, California.
Tesla divulged the relocation plans in October and made the move official in a Dec. 1 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The headquarters are now based at the same site as the company's $1.1 billion factory under construction in eastern Travis County.
People are moving, too
In terms of population, Texas added the most residents of any state by raw numbers in 2021.
The Lone Star State gained an estimated 310,288 people, a roughly 1.1% increase, between July 1, 2020 and July 1, 2021, according to the data released Dec. 21 by the U.S. Census Bureau. That factors in both migration and births. Texas was estimated to have a population of 29.5 million by July of this year.
California, meanwhile, lost residents for the second year in a row. The Golden State fell by an estimated 261,902 residents from July 1, 2020, to July 1, 2021, marking just the second year since at least 1900 that the state’s population has dipped, according to the Census estimates.
Still, California remains the most populous state with roughly 39.2 million residents, though the Census also estimated that the state lost the most residents in the nation — 367,299 — to domestic migration.
Texas is luring the headquarters of California companies at more than four times the rate of its nearest competitor, and Dallas-Fort Worth and Austin top the list of destinations within the Lone Star State, according to business relocation expert Joe Vranich.
Read the full article at The Dallas Business Journal