Mercedes-Benz USA Moving from New Jersey to Atlanta
Daimler AG’s Mercedes-Benz will move its U.S. headquarters to Atlanta from New Jersey, rejecting efforts by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie to keep the facility in his state.
The German luxury builder of cars and cargo vans will relocate employees in Montvale, New Jersey, to a temporary facility in Atlanta while a headquarters — expected to be completed in early 2017 — is built in the new location, the company said in a statement. About 1,000 employees will be affected, the company said.
The move follows other auto industry relocations in the U.S. Toyota Motor Corp. said in April that it would move its U.S. headquarters to suburban Dallas from suburban Los Angeles. Detroit-based General Motors Co. is moving its Cadillac brand to New York. Fuji Heavy Industries Ltd.’s Subaru decided to move its U.S. office from one New Jersey town to another.
Christie had met with and called a top executive at the carmaker, Michael Drewniak, a spokesman for the governor, said in an e-mailed statement.
“In each conversation Mercedes USA made one thing very clear about its decision to leave — the cost of doing business and the tax environment is just too high here to be competitive with a state like Georgia,” said Drewniak. “This only reinforces Governor Christie’s repeated calls to lower taxes and change the business climate.”
Christie’s administration has spent heavily in its effort to make New Jersey more appealing to employers, granting $1.6 billion to 81 development projects in the past year as of December.
A tax break approved in December worth $118 million persuaded Subaru of America to remain in the state, building new headquarters in Camden. The company was running out of space in Cherry Hill, a town 5 miles east, where the automaker built its U.S. headquarters in 1986.
Mercedes-Benz’s departure is a “significant loss,” Assemblywoman Holly Schepisi, who represents the legislative district that the automaker is leaving, said by telephone after the announcement.
Christie, 52, a second-term Republican, has awarded more than $4 billion in business tax breaks since becoming governor in 2010. New Jersey Policy Perspective, a Trenton group that has been critical of the incentives, said in a report last year that the program has been a “largely unsuccessful” effort to boost New Jersey’s economy.
The state’s unemployment rate was 6.4% in November.
Mercedes, hampered early last year by limited inventory for its popular CLA sedan, lost the U.S. luxury-auto sales crown to BMW AG in 2014. Daimler’s brand sold 330,391 in U.S. last year, up 5.7%, according to its statement earlier this week.
