Over the past few years, we’ve seen many companies make the difficult decision to relocate their headquarters. The reasons have been varied, but can generally be boiled down to a few key factors: rising tax burdens, regulatory pressures and a growing sense they were no longer welcome.
No longer feeling welcome may actually be an amalgam of all of those reasons combined. It’s one thing to watch every manufacturing business in your state burdened with taxes, but it’s another to see your neighbors and workers being legislatively prevented from owning the products they’re making on your assembly lines.
If that sounds ridiculous, imagine how it must have sounded to Smith & Wesson when Massachusetts introduced legislation that would ban ownership of the modern sporting rifles that made up a significant portion of their business. Workers could make them, but they couldn’t own them.
Tennessee hasn’t been the only one to benefit from Massachusetts-style legislative intransigence. In 2016 Beretta USA moved its manufacturing operations from Accokeek, Maryland to a new $45 million state-of-the-art facility in Gallatin, Tennessee.
Once again, “socially responsible” legislation like Maryland’s Firearms Safety Act of 2013 was more important to legislators than tax revenues or good manufacturing jobs. That’s why gun-friendly states are openly recruiting companies from those states.
SHOT Show’s Governors Forum is a good example as governors answer relevant questions while weaving in reasons why SHOT attendees need to give their states serious consideration as their new homes.
Often the loss is more than simply the companies. Increasingly, employees are relocating along with their employers. Reasons cited include everything from job satisfaction to lowered taxes and costs of living that allow them to improve their personal situations while keeping their jobs.
And it’s not just guns. Charles Schwab moved from San Francisco to north Texas. Tesla moved out of Palo Alto and Chevron, the oil giant that began in California, left for Texas. Marcus Lemonis says he won’t open or re-open any of his businesses in California. His reasoning was simple: “California has created one of the most over-regulated, expensive, and risky business environments for business.”
Wednesday, another longtime California company announced it was throwing in the proverbial towel on California. Yamaha Motor Company is leaving Cypress, California after almost half a century there. The company will be moving its U.S. headquarters to Georgia, unifying their operations in the Peach State.
Their reasoning is, once again, familiar: a need to improve profitability and relieve tax and regulatory pressures.
We’re told Yamaha will be selling its 25-acre Cypress property and complete the relocation to Atlanta suburb Kennesaw, Georgia by 2028. The company’s marine and motorsport business facilities relocated to Kennesaw in 1999 and 2019. The Cypress facility has housed Yamaha’s corporate and financial services. The move will involve the sale of all land, offices, warehouses and fixed assets in California.
Yamaha explained the decision in their announcement as being based on “one of the Company’s key measures aimed at improving asset efficiency and enhanced profitability in the United States.” The company said it’s also making structural reforms “in response to cost increases resulting from U.S. tariffs and changes in the marketing environment.”
Relocation decisions for corporations are never easy or inexpensive. But some states are making the decision to do so easier than others.
As always, we’ll keep you posted.
“Once again, ‘socially responsible’ legislation like Maryland’s Firearms Safety Act of 2013 was more important to legislators…”
Improper use of “socially responsible”. Tyranny agenda and stupid or deliberate infringement of constitutional rights for law abiding people by a state government is not an act of ‘responsibility’ socially or otherwise.