Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 22, 1995 TAG: 9501240002
SECTION: ECONOMY PAGE: ENRV-10 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: STEPHEN FOSTER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
"Global economy" - the two words together reflect what the modern age hath wrought.
Time was that the ultimate act of international exchange was seen in the years-long journey of traders from northern Italy to the Far East looking to barter for silk and rice.
But in the last century, the world has seen a communications revolution of television, earth-orbiting satellites and computer networks; faster and faster modes of travel in the form of airplanes, rockets and space shuttles; and an almost-global colonization by the forces of capitalism.
In the last decade, Japanese auto manufacturers began building their cars on American soil, and McDonald's opened in the former Soviet Union.
Here at home, plenty of threads tie the valley to the world: Companies like Pulaski's Xaloy or Magnox export more than 80 percent of their products. German-owned, British-owned and Japanese-owned companies do business here, and the valley's economic developers travel across the oceans looking to lure more companies.
For Hoechst-Celanese, the shipping of fibers for cigarette filters from tiny Narrows around the world to China is just another act of everyday business.
These days - in a world where you can use an automatic teller card from Virginia to get pounds in England, or where an American defense firm can exact respect from enemies of a small mid-Eastern country with a billion-dollar transaction of fighter jets - the economies of the world's regions, countries and states are but pieces of a truly global economy puzzle.
Philosophically, the business of the New River Valley is a part of that puzzle, too, if for no other reason than, as economic developer Franklyn Moreno puts it:
"As long as we're aware we're in it, we're in it."
Figuring out the part that the valley's manufacturers play in the global economy is almost as difficult as putting together a 5,000-piece jigsaw puzzle of a covered bridge on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
A few companies - some extremely significant to the valley's overall employment picture - report to owners outside the United States. Volvo GM Heavy Truck Corp. answers to the Swedes; Hoechst-Celanese to the Germans. Other foreign-owned firms are British-owned BBA Friction Inc. of Dublin; Pulaski's Magnox, recently wholly purchased by a Japanese company; and a few others.
But perhaps more important to the region's place in the global economy is the products made here that go ... everywhere.
Exports accounted for 13 percent of the state's total 1994 manufacturing output, according to the Virginia Department of Economic Development.
But regional statistics aren't kept on the volume or value of exported products.
However, in a corporate survey of 166 area companies conducted in 1993 by the New River Valley Planing District Commission, 29 percent of the those that responded said they exported products.
That's "pretty high" for a region, according to Holly Lesko, the commission's project manager. "We have a very diverse manufacturing base."
Indeed, those companies range from giants like Celanese, which employs 2,000 to make acetate yarn used in cigarette filters, to Hoover Color Corp., a 70-year-old company hidden away in Hiwassee that for a half-century has been mining and exporting pigments used in, among other things, making Crayola crayons.
And there are signs that the ability to export is a part of any healthy business. Just this past year, companies that have announced expansions have included Volvo GM; Blacksburg's Wolverine Gasket & Manufacturing Co.; Radford's RADVA Inc.; Christiansburg's Corning; and VTLS Inc., located in Virginia Tech's corporate research center. All send their products out of the country.
Regardless of the company's size, exporting means one main thing: more market for a product.
"It means you get an awful lot of inquiries from an awful lot of people," said Luther Dickens, president of RADVA, whose patented Thermastructure building panels are manufactured and sold in Russia, Australia, Mexico and elsewhere.
For a small business, moving to a global market often means a long, costly and patience-consuming period of opening contacts and making deals. For a huge, established corporation, though, the scope of a global economy and marketplace becomes intermeshed with the corporation's very existence.
"We think of ourselves as a global business," said Bob Moore, human resources manager for Hoechst-Celanese, whose Narrows plant exports about 40 percent of its product to China, Indonesia and elsewhere. By that he means that the company - which also has plants in Mexico, Belgium, China and Canada - transcends the concept of exporting from a specified base to other places on the globe by making the entire world its market and manufacturing home.
"Our product will go to China as fast as it will go to Phillip-Morris in Richmond," Moore said.
Those who make their living by contributing to the health of the New River Valley's overall economy note where companies come from and where products go.
Moreno, director of the New River Valley Economic Development Alliance, and Don Moore, Montgomery County's director of economic development, not only look within this nation's borders for prospects to bring here, but outside it as well.
"When we go international marketing, we're looking for people who want to have a presence in the United States," said Moreno, who travels to overseas trade shows, as well as domestic ones, to tout the valley. Companies want to come here because, "the U.S. has traditionally been the largest market in the world." However, as with all industrial courtship, finding the company isn't as difficult as landing it.
Granted, when it comes down to it, whether a company is headquartered in the United States or overseas matters only so much. Both, if they locate here, pay the local government's taxes and provide jobs, and those acts are of prime importance, Moreno points out.
Still, adding a dash of business with foreign interests, or making sure a good chunk of the region's profits is shipped out of the country also is important. "It's significant because it gets to the heart of economic principles - diversification," Moore said.
Said Lesko, the Planning Commission's project manager: "The way to bring dollars into your region is to sell outside of it."
But ask Moore if he would try harder to land the company interested in Montgomery County that is from, say, Minnesota, or the equally-attractive firm in terms of jobs and investment from, for example, France, and the answer is simple:
"I doubt if we would treat either one of them in any preferred manner. We'd just work real hard with both of them," Moore said.
by CNB