Quote:
Originally Posted by anyiliang
Future Mayor presents a lot of good points. But from my experience in the corporate world, most major corporations, incentives and tax breaks are the main reasons why companies will relocate. Take Boeing for example. They had it good in Seattle, but once their tax breaks were up, they went looking for a new city. Seattle offered some new ones but Chicago gave Boeing what they wanted. Although your view of a CEO moving a company because he/she wants to, I think this can be misleading. Some CEO’s might be able to do this but not the majority of them can because they have to answer to the board of directors and shareholders. And if they don’t agree with what the CEO has proposed to them, then they wont let the move happen. Just my 2 cents…
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Anyiliang: When Boeing made the move from Seattle to Chicago, they reported in the press that they were making the move to be closer to financial markets. Of course, a corp. staff, even for a company the size of Boeing, is not large, probably a few hundred. I still think for service companies, like the IT side of Boeing, the primary consideration is the ability to attract and hold employees. I know when SAP established their US headquarters, just west of Philly, the primary considerations were access to an international airport, inexpensive land, and an area where engineers, lots of engineers, would live. I do know, however, when CIBER Systems, a pretty good sized IT services company (over $1B in revenue) relocated from Detroit to Denver, the primary reason was because the CEO wanted to be closer to skiing. The same was true in the late 80's, when Ziff-Davis (the publishing giant) was considering moving to Sandy. The boss loved Snowbird. They backed out of the deal, however. Rumor was that many of their key people did not want to relocate from Boston to Sandy.