Big win for Laurens County, SC, which is about 30 minutes south of Greenville, SC, with the ZF Group announcing a $350 million plant where the German manufacturer will produce auto transmissions. One of the company's largest customers, BMW, has a facility nearby in Spartanburg.
One of the most interesting aspects of this new plant is the level of employment it will support per capital dollar invested. It's expected to create 900 jobs once it's fully up and running, or one job for every $390,000 of capital invested. This is fairly labor-intensive for modern manufacturing, and quite a bit lower than the $650,000 of capital Toyota will spend for every job it creates at its new Corolla and Prius plant in Blue Springs, Mississippi. It's also far more jobs per capital dollar than the Dow Kokam battery plant in Midland, Michigan, which Joe Biden and Jennifer Granholm have been treating like an economic savior, yet will only create one operational job for every $1 million of capital invested. The ZF plant will need more than 2.5x as many workers per dollar invested than that heavily publicized battery plant.
South Carolina, which has struggled during the recession, has also stayed focused. There haven't been any silly "cool cities" campaigns in Columbia, Greenville, or Charleston, and it's continued to recruit manufacturers, and not fallen for any of the creative city Richard Florida hype. In addition, it's now putting together supply chains of one producer selling to another, which is far more sustainable economically than creating yet another "urban artists neighborhood".
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