Just as an Indiana company goes through the nationâ??s first initial public offering in months, its executives ratchet up
their
plans to move the headquarters out
of state.
Mead Johnson, the Evansville baby formula maker, staged a successful IPO on Wednesday, and saw its share price climb 10 percent on its first day as a public company.
But the execs intend to move the headquarters and several dozen people to Chicagoâ??s northern suburbs, where nutritional expertise and flights are easier to come by.
Lots of public companies have headquarters in small- and medium-sized cities. Wabash National, which manufactures truck trailers, is in Lafayette. Kimball International makes furniture in the southern Indiana hardwood center of Jasper. Warsaw, in northern Indiana, has Zimmer, the prosthetics giant.
Is a smaller city inherently deficient as a home for a public company headquarters? Is there anything inherently wrong with Evansville?
For that matter, how about Indianapolis as a headquarters city? After all, precious few Fortune 500 companies call Indianapolis home.
Mead Johnson, the Evansville baby formula maker, staged a successful IPO on Wednesday, and saw its share price climb 10 percent on its first day as a public company.
But the execs intend to move the headquarters and several dozen people to Chicagoâ??s northern suburbs, where nutritional expertise and flights are easier to come by.
Lots of public companies have headquarters in small- and medium-sized cities. Wabash National, which manufactures truck trailers, is in Lafayette. Kimball International makes furniture in the southern Indiana hardwood center of Jasper. Warsaw, in northern Indiana, has Zimmer, the prosthetics giant.
Is a smaller city inherently deficient as a home for a public company headquarters? Is there anything inherently wrong with Evansville?
For that matter, how about Indianapolis as a headquarters city? After all, precious few Fortune 500 companies call Indianapolis home.
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Mitch should have been able to call Jim Cornelius CEO of Bristol Myers, parent and majority shareholder of Mead Johnson, and get the headquarters located somewhere in Indiana.
Cornelius was Mitch's largest campaign donor and is the former chairman of Guidant and Eli Lilly executive. You would think that this would have been an relatively easy win, but now it is a huge corporate headquarters loss like Lincoln National to Fort Wayne or Ball Corp to Muncie.
After years of planning, substantial marketing and promotional efforts, and tens of millions of dollars of investment by government, university and corporate partnerships, they failed to retain the headquarters of one of the largest life science companies in the state.
There needs to be some serious soul searching after this loss and a refocused energy on getting RESULTS.
http://theurbanophile.blogspot.com/2008/10/chicago-corporate-headquarters-and.html
There's nothing Mitch could do about it.
Consider too, moving the HQ to Indianapolis would certainly not do wonders for building better relations between Indy and southwest Indiana.
Yes, I'd rather see Mead Johnson in Indiana, but we are talking a small number of jobs here. The vast bulk of the jobs are staying in Evansville.
Indy is starting to get to the place where it can compete in these situations. We won't win them all, but I think if we keep up the relentless pressure for civic improvement, we'll win more and more over time.