PDF: 21st Annual Corporate Survey Complete Results - Area ...
PDF: 21st Annual Corporate Survey Complete Results - Area ...
PDF: 21st Annual Corporate Survey Complete Results - Area ...
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also] expectations that this lackluster pace of growth will<br />
carry over into the beginning months of 2007.” The<br />
board’s survey found that only 16 percent of chief executives<br />
expect economic conditions to improve in the<br />
coming months — down from 21 percent that felt that<br />
FIGURE 3<br />
Number of employees (all facilities):<br />
FIGURE 4<br />
20-49 — 6%<br />
50-99 — 13%<br />
100-499 — 41%<br />
500-999 — 14%<br />
1,000 or more — 26%<br />
Change in the number of facilities during the past 12 months:<br />
FIGURE 5<br />
Increased facilities by 3 or more — 10%<br />
Increased facilities by 2 or fewer — 15%<br />
Number of facilities not changed — 65%<br />
Decreased facilities by 2 or fewer — 4%<br />
Decreased facilities by 3 or more — 6%<br />
Primary reasons for increasing number of facilities:<br />
Increased sales/production — 73%<br />
New product line(s) — 46%<br />
New markets — 58%<br />
Result of merger/acquisition — 38%<br />
Other — 17%<br />
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80<br />
way in the second quarter of 2006. Additionally, fewer<br />
than half of the 60 senior manufacturing executives<br />
recently interviewed by PricewaterhouseCoopers are<br />
optimistic about the state of the U.S. economy over the<br />
next 12 months — down from 76 percent who were<br />
optimistic just six months prior.<br />
So which prognosticators are correct? In order to find<br />
out — as we have done for the past 20 years — <strong>Area</strong><br />
Development’s editors surveyed the magazine’s corporate<br />
readership this past August to find out about their<br />
plans to open up new facilities at home and abroad,<br />
expand existing facilities, and/or relocate. We also<br />
asked about their site selection priorities so that we<br />
could gauge how they had changed over the last year.<br />
The results of our 2006 <strong>Corporate</strong> <strong>Survey</strong> are presented<br />
in this report.<br />
Who Are They?<br />
As in years past, more than four-fifths of the respondents<br />
to our survey are with manufacturing companies.<br />
Only 5 percent said they represented warehousing/distribution<br />
firms (Figure 1).<br />
Thirty-five percent of the respondent companies<br />
operate just one domestic facility, about a fifth operate<br />
two, while more than a third have five or more facilities<br />
in operation. When it comes to foreign operations, however,<br />
59 percent of the respondents that operate foreign<br />
facilities have five or more, with about a fifth having<br />
just one (Figure 2).<br />
For the most part, the respondent companies are