New Business Announcements: Q3/24
These announcements represent companies that have either established new operations in the region, relocated company headquarters to the region, or expanded existing Houston-area operations.
PROJECT CATEGORY
The Partnership identified 70 companies that expanded Houston-area operations, between July ’24 and September ’24, another 42 that established new operations in the Houston area. Out of those 42 new establishments, one of those is a headquarter relocation: Fluxworks, which manufactures magnetic gears and magnetic gear integrated motors/generators.
To qualify as a “new business announcement,” the project must disclose at least one of the following values: number of created jobs, amount of capital invested, and/or footage of office or industrial space leased. Only a small portion of the new business announcements disclose more than one of these values, however. As a result, the Partnership’s analysis of capital investment, employment, and square footage represent a low-ball estimate for new business activity.
YEAR-OVER-YEAR
Q3/24 logged 112 announcements, a 30 percent decrease over Q3/23 when 161 projects were announced. However, capital investment and estimated jobs have increased. Of the 112 announcements, nine provided information on new jobs totaling 1,680, 10 on the capital investment totaling $8.9 billion, and 102 on space occupied totaling 7.6 million square feet.
Q3/24 New Business Announcements Summary:
- 112 announced projects
- 9 projects reported 1,680 new jobs
- 10 projects reported $8.9 billion estimated capital expenditures
- 102 projects reported 7.6 million estimated commercial square footage
Q3/23 New Business Announcement Summary:
- 161 announced projects
- Seven projects reported 1,385 new jobs
- Nine projects reported $1.3 billion capital expenditures
- 153 projects reported 10.8 million commercial square footage
ANNOUNCEMENTS BY FACILITY TYPE
The project announcements in Q3/24 fall into five categories: distribution warehouse, headquarters, manufacturing, office, and research and development.
ANNOUNCEMENTS BY INDUSTRY
Over a third (34 percent) of the announcements involved companies engages in manufacturing. This included chemical, building materials, and data center equipment.
Transportation and warehousing accounted for 13 percent of all new project announcements, closely followed by professional, scientific and technical services which accounted for 10 percent.
PARTNERSHIP WINS
The Partnership played a key role in five of the new business announcements in Q3/24. The Partnership’s support included services such as a potential location selection, possible incentives for establishing a facility in the area, and market research. These five Partnership supported projects collectively generated more than 480 new jobs, attracted more than $41.5 million in capital investment, and represented four international companies.
Details on selected Partnership projects:
- Chenta Precision Machinery is a Taiwanese company that manufactures industrial equipment.
- Creality is a Chinese company that also manufactures industrial equipment.
- Fluxworks’ is a company that manufactures magnetic gears and magnetic gear integrated motors/generators. It moved its headquarters from College Station, TX to Houston.
- Healgen Scientific LLC has a parent office in China and conducts research and development for the health care industry.
- YPFB Chaco is a renewable energy research and development company based in Bolivia.
Methodology
The Partnership Methodology compiles information from a variety of sources for our New Business Announcements (NBAs) database. Methods include, but are not limited to, scraping news articles, monitoring Google alerts, and tapping into several databases, such as CoStar. We also include Partnership-assisted projects from our Economic Development Division. Generally, NBAs are projects that meet the qualifying criteria for new and/or expanded corporate real estate facilities, such as having new construction or renovation and meeting one or more of the following criteria: creating 20 or more new jobs, having 5,000 or more square footage, or having an investment of $1 million or more. Retail, educational, government, and other non-commercial facilities do not qualify, but projects creating a headquarters, data center, distribution warehouse, call center, or research and development facility will count.
Prepared by Greater Houston Partnership Research
Margaret Barrientos
Research Analyst
mbarrientos@houston.org
