THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, February 20, 1995 TAG: 9502180625
SECTION: BUSINESS WEEKLY PAGE: 04 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: Talk of the Town
LENGTH: Medium: 80 lines
Reports out of South Carolina suggest Virginia will lure the Nucor Inc. steel mill. But the Palmetto State hasn't given in.
S.C. lawmakers recently decided Nucor, whose proposed plant would consume $24 million worth of electricity a year, can negotiate lower power costs directly with the state-owned utility.
Nucor expects to pick a site in 30 days for the $450 million steel mill. The choices are a rural area on the north edge of Hampton Roads, or Cainhoy, S.C.
Nucor, based in Charlotte, operates minimills without the massive ovens that render iron ore. Minimills melt scrap metal in a high-tech furnace.
Nucor mills usually are in rural areas free of strong labor unions. Recently, it opened a steel mill along the Mississippi River in the Arkansas cotton belt. Many mill workers reportedly were rural white men selected for their hard work habits from the crews of subcontractors who built the steel plant.
The average mill wage, about $25,000, was almost triple the per capita income prevailing in rural Arkansas. Team bonuses based on productivity and plant income commonly pushed annual pay for each worker beyond $50,000.
Bonuses motivated the teams, and enabled Nucor's sales force to adjust steel prices to market conditions. In conjunction with the dollar's low value abroad, Nucor could undercut the tough competitors overseas who had flattened the U.S. steel industy.
Two small food processors report major strides. Ocean Foods Inc., founded in 1984 in the Virginia Beach home of William Mall, plans to install a freezer powered by an ammonia plant to accommodate processed food destined for the West Coast, Canada, Hong Kong, Japan and Korea. Ocean Food processes crab, conch, frozen and fresh fish in Chesapeake.
TWB Gourmet Foods Inc., co-founded a few years ago by Chris St. James, opened a plant last month at 2620 Elmhurst Lane in Portsmouth to make fancy marinades, sauces and glazes. Retailers and megaprocessors buy its Thunder Bay line.
Colonial Williamsburg fell shy of 1 million visitors again. The former Virginia capital drew about 926,000 visitors last year, slightly more than in '93.
CW head Robert Wilburn isn't sitting still at the 3,600-employee theme park and museum. This month, CW brought aboard New York advertising agency Margeotes Fertitta Donaher Weiss Inc.
``We want to reposition ourselves as a destination of choice,'' CW communications manager Patrick Saylor said. ``We have name recognition, but the fact is, many others don't know what we're all about.''
Margeotes Fertitta, whose clients include NFL Enterprises, is versed in direct mail, multimedia, cable television and Internet advertising.
Don Waldy, the Virginia Beach venture capitalist we mentioned last week, has a new telephone number: 481-5731.
First, the biggest retail executive in Hampton Roads consolidated his warehouses on the West Coast. Then he put the number-crunchers on a similar mission for his East Coast operation. Finally, the numbers are in. And the warehouses in Hampton Roads won't be crunched.
We're talking about Rear Adm. John T. Kavanaugh, a major user of truck services. He heads the U.S. Navy Exchange Service Command, a $2.2 billion worldwide chain of Navy department stores based in Virginia Beach.
``The distribution experts are always saying put a warehouse at the confluence of two interstates usually out in the middle of North Carolina someplace,'' Kavanaugh said.
But the Norfolk and Jacksonville warehouses have something even better than crisscrossing interstates - free rent in Navy buildings.
What could change the equation is the loss of Nexcom's free textile and apparel warehouse at an Army port facility in Bayonne, N.J. The Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission may recommend closing the base.
``If I was forced to move from there, that would force me to go into a leased space somewhere and that would change the computer modeling'' used to pick the location for an East Coast distribution center, Kavanaugh said. by CNB