F D I
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FDI Employment Growth DOUBLES Overall Job Growth
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exas may soon be announcing one of its largest foreign direct investments (FDI) to date — a $17 billion semiconductor project for South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co. The site search, which reportedly includes locations in Korea, New York and Arizona, was still under way in early April. Should Texas land the project, it would likely join the Austin industrial market, where Samsung Austin Semiconductor has employed thousands of workers for the past 25 years. The Samsung project would add more than 500 FDI jobs to the Lone Star State’s more than 666,000 — the secondhighest number of such jobs by MARK in the U.S. behind California. More than 1,700 international companies have operations in Texas, employing more than 203,800 in the manufacturing sector, or 31% of all FDI jobs in the state, according to the Global Business Alliance. As a percent of total workers, Texas has the highest number of FDI jobs in the South Central U.S., at 6.1%. FDI employment growth grew 28% from 2013 to 2018; the state’s overall private-sector employment grew 13% in that timeframe, or half the rate of FDI job growth. In November 2020, Site Selection magazine named Texas the top state for FDI based on projects involving foreign-based end-user
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TEXAS ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT GUIDE
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investors, total project-related capex and total project-related job creation according to the publication’s proprietary Conway Projects Database. Two Texas metros — Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land and Dallas-Fort WorthArlington — placed fifth and sixth respectively in the Top 10 metros for FDI projects nationally. Texas is home to 32 foreign trade zones, giving international companies requiring the benefits afforded by those plenty of location options. The U.K., Germany, Canada, France and Japan are the countries with those most FDI projects in Texas from 2011 to 2016, according to the AREND Governor’s Office of Economic Development & Tourism. The top five by job creation are Japan, Canada, Germany, India and the U.K. Japanese Investors Add Texas Facilities Japan appears in both Top 5 lists, and in November 2020 it added another project to its extensive presence in Texas. CKD Corporation, headquartered in Aichi, Japan, announced its first U.S. production site in Austin. The $13-million investment will create up to 70 new jobs and is scheduled to begin operations in fall 2021. CKD
