Apparently all of my talk about how great Texas is has rubbed off on Toyota, or perhaps the low cost of doing business has encouraged the automaker to move "substantial parts of its U.S. headquarters" away from Torrance, California to suburban Dallas as Bloomberg just reported. Howdy, y'all, I hope you like brisket.
Here's what Bloomberg has:
Toyota has more than 5,300 California employees, most at its Torrance campus in sales, finance, marketing, engineering and product planning. Details on which functions will move and when may be announced as soon as tomorrow, after the employee meeting. When Nissan Motor Co.'s moved its North American headquarters to lower-cost Tennessee in 2006, only 42 percent of employees initially chose to relocate.
Toyota City, Japan-based Toyota may base its new regional sales headquarters in or near Plano, Texas, said three of the people who asked not to be named as the plan isn't yet public. The majority of Toyota's Torrance operations may move to Texas over a two-year period, the people said.
The reasons may have a lot to do with how cheap it is to move a business to Texas, the proximity of their manufacturing operations in San Antonio, and the mere fact that Texas is awesome (Plano may not be my favorite part of Texas, but it's still Texas). That may not be persuasive to people who live in California and planned to stay there, of course.
Is this Rick Perry's plan to poach other businesses in action?