Blount County has global business appeal

By Rick Laney
of The Daily Times Staff

Most local residents are not aware of Blount County's efforts to attract international companies to East Tennessee.

The Blount County Chamber of Commerce is involved in international recruiting efforts that challenge the programs of towns like Chicago, Atlanta and St. Louis and the efforts have paid off handsomely in recent years.

Blount County has two full-time international representatives. Taka Yamaguchi runs a Blount County office in Japan while David Gibbons operates Blount's European office in England.

"We are competing with towns like Charlotte, Boston and Atlanta," said Bryan Daniels, executive vice president of the Economic Development Board Blount Partnership.

"No other town our size is as aggressive as we are here in Blount County.

"We're viewed throughout the entire state as one of the most progressive and aggressive counties around. You just don't see the things we're doing in other communities."

To date, 11 European companies have moved to Blount County as a direct result of the recruiting efforts. The Japanese office was instrumental in DENSO coming to Blount and has played a key role in its current expansion.

"Specmat is a European company that came to the Stock Creek Industrial Park," Daniels said.

"They recently had issues with a Japanese supplier, so they turned to our office in Japan.

"So we had a company that moved here as a result of our European office using our Japanese office to resolve a problem."

The industrial parks and business centers are a large part of Blount's international draw. The county's parks include:

n           Big Springs Industrial Park

n           Blount County Industrial Park

n           Springbrook Corporate Centre

n           Partnership Park South

n           Stock Creek Development Centre

n           Pellissippi Research Centre, on the Oak Ridge Corridor

The anchor tenant of the new 450-acre Pellissippi Research Centre will be Molecular Pathology Laboratory Network Inc. (MPLN).

Molecular Pathology announced in October that it would move from its current headquarters at 250 E. Broadway Ave. in downtown Maryville to a new facility nearly three times as large as its current 27,000-square-foot building in the new technology park.

According to Daniels, efforts to attract other high-tech tenants to the new technology park will focus on MPLN's business and the technologies it utilizes.

The technology park is located in Alcoa at the site of the Luther Jackson Farm where Pellissippi Parkway meets Old Knoxville Highway (near the Clayton Homes headquarters).

The park will feature 230 acres of corporate office space and another 125 acres set aside for mixed-use development to include residential and retail projects.

The park is the result of collaboration between Knox and Blount counties and the cities of Alcoa and Maryville. Each of the four partners contributed 25 percent of the money needed to develop the park.

The park is expected to grow and develop over the next 20 to 30 years and should create over a billion dollars in local economic impact.

DENSO Manufacturing Tennessee Inc., already a major player in the Blount County business community, is investing $185 million in an expansion project scheduled for completion in 2008.

In November, DENSO officially entered the second phase of its expansion that will culminate with a new body electronics plant and up to 500 new Blount County employees.

DENSO currently employs 2,538 at its Blount County facilities. It will add 150 new employees before the new plant opens and plans to hire up to 500 new employees by 2010.

Fred Forster, president and CEO of the Blount County Chamber of Commerce, said he remembers many local residents opening their homes to Japanese employees planning to relocate to Blount County for DENSO in the late 1980s.

"Couples here in our community adopted Japanese families," Forster said, "and we realized we share the same values and the same principles. It's really all about people."

According to Forster, DENSO's philosophy of continuous improvement and excellence is consistent with the Blount Chamber's vision for the whole community.

"This community stands strongly behind this company and all its efforts," Forster said.

DENSO manufactures about 40 different automotive components including alternators, starters, keyless entry systems, engine controllers and a variety of other electronic components for the transportation industry.

DENSO Manufacturing Tennessee is part of a global company that is one of the world's largest manufacturers of advanced technology, components and systems for major automakers.

The Instrument Cluster Division, led by Senior Vice President Jack Helmboldt, employs more than 650 people who produce not only instrument clusters, but also center displays and air-conditioning control panels.

DENSO's customers include Toyota, DaimlerChrysler, Honda, Ford and General Motors.

As Blount County continues to expand its international recruiting efforts, Daniels is confident more international companies will open plants and offices in Blount County.

"We have our own site selector contacts and our own foreign offices," Daniels said.

"We regularly take recruiting trips to other countries so we can tell them everything Blount County has to offer.

"We're not going to sit around waiting for someone to come to us -- we're going after them, just like we have been the past 30 years."