Toyota Motor Corp. plans to consolidate U.S. sales, engineering and finance operations to suburban Dallas, sending 4,000 jobs from California, New York and Kentucky to a new North American headquarters.
The shift to Plano, Texas, affects about 2,000 people at Toyota’s U.S. sales headquarters in Torrance, California, 1,000 employees from its Kentucky engineering and manufacturing unit, and some staff from its holding company in New York, the carmaker said in a statement today. About 1,000 people from its finance company will also go to Texas by 2017, Toyota said. Headquarters construction is projected to be complete in late 2016 or early 2017.
“Toyota’s announced move to Texas is a shock since the automaker has been part of the Southern California community for decades, but it indicates that money -– and tax incentives –- talks when it comes to headquarters locations,” said Jack Nerad, senior industry analyst for Kelley Blue Book. “The dollar savings from the relocation should be fairly easy to quantify, but what’s much harder to quantify is the cost in business disruption and ‘brain-drain’ such a move can cause.”