A Belgian flooring company will build its U.S. headquarters in Cartersville and add hundreds of jobs to the industry’s revival in Northwest Georgia.
Beaulieu International Group plans to build a $250 million plant in Bartow County that will create about 350 jobs over five years. The company did not release average wages or salaries for the new positions or give a breakdown between white- and blue-collar jobs in its announcement Monday.
But state and local officials hailed the move as evidence of the flooring industry’s recovery from the effects of the housing bust.
“There were a lot of down years during the downturn of the economy,” said Melinda Lemmon, the executive director for the Cartersville-Bartow County Economic Development office. “This is a big deal.”
The 120-acre plant will be built on land previously owned by Anheuser-Busch, now part of Belgian giant InBev, and should open by the end of 2015.
James Jarrett, chairman of the Bartow-Cartersville Joint Development Authority, said Beaulieu International’s incentive package included tax rollbacks on land and buildings, for 15 and 10 years respectively, and abatements on city and county taxes, but not school taxes.
Beaulieu International is one of several flooring companies expanding again in a region that suffered through double-digit unemployment numbers and thousands of job cuts during the Great Recession.
Last year, Engineered Floors announced it would build two carpet plants in Dalton, spending $450 million on the project. Shaw Industries said it would spend $85 million to build a carpet tile facility in Adairsville, and then announced a $17 million recycling center in Ringgold near Dalton in June.
Mohawk Industries, in December, announced plans to expand two carpet plants in Dalton and Rome.
The expansions by those three companies are expected to add almost 3,400 jobs.
Northwest Georgia has long been a flooring industry magnet. Coming off the housing collapse, Dalton, known as the “Carpet Capital of the World,” lost the most jobs of any metro area in the nation from November 2011 to November 2012.
Gov. Nathan Deal said House Bill 386, which he signed in 2012, has attracted manufacturers to the state by eliminating the state sales tax on energy used in manufacturing.
“It makes us very competitive with other states when trying to attain new business and also in trying to retain the businesses that we have,” Deal said.
Steve Roan, a sales and marketing director with the company, said the jobs are expected to be mostly filled by Georgians, including technical graduates from Georgia Tech and Kennesaw State.
The company will make and distribute 16-foot-wide, cushion sheet vinyl flooring as its initial product.
“This product is a higher-end product from a manufacturing capability, very technology driven,” Roan said. “It was important to us to have access to local talent.”
Beaulieu International has not had a presence in the U.S. A similarly named company that already operates in Georgia, Beaulieu of America, once was part of the Belgian company but is now separate.
Beaulieu International CEO Geert Roelens said the timing for his company’s move is right.
“What we know is that the market in the U.S., after the crisis period from 2008 to 2009, is gradually coming back,” Roelens said. “We can see already that the future on this piece of land will be bright.”
