Types of new foreign facilities to
be opened by consultants’ clients
(as percentage of total new foreign projects):
• Manufacturing
• Warehouse/Distribution
• Headquarters
• Back Office/Call Center
• Data Center
• Shared Services
• R&D
• Other
34%
21%
6%
16%
3%
6%
6%
9%
chart M
Offshoring or Onshoring?
Have you seen an increase in the number of
companies establishing foreign facilities as
opposed to domestic ones over the last year?
• Yes 27%
• No 73%
• Yes 29%
• No 71%
Have any of your clients relocated
a facility back to the U.S.
from a foreign location?
chart N
Problems clients operating offshore
facilities have encountered:
• Rising foreign labor costs
• Problems finding qualified and/
or English-speaking labor
• Product quality issues
• Legal or regulatory problems
• Inadequate utility infrastructure
• Difficulties transporting supplies/products
• Cost of transporting supplies/products
• Social/cultural barriers
• Other
16%
22%
20%
12%
10%
14%
28%
6%
6%
chart O
dents); 20 percent said there were product quality
issues — as the latest hazards of China-made products bear out; and 28 percent said the cost of transporting supplies and/or finished products was burdensome to their clients (Chart O).
SITE SELECTION PRIORITIES
We asked the consultants to rate the same site
selection and quality-of-life factors rated by the corporate executives as either “very important,” “important,”
“minor consideration,” or “of no importance.” We then
added together the “very important” and “important”
ratings to rank the factors in order of priority, as
shown in Chart P.
This year, our responding consultants are of the
same mindset as our responding corporate executives when it comes to the site selection factors. The
respondents to our 2009 Consultants Survey have
ranked highway accessibility first (98.9 percent of the
respondents gave it a “very important” or “important”
rating) and labor costs in second position, with a 94.3
percent rating in importance. Last year, the labor costs
factor was only ranked 10th by the consultants with
an 82.8 percent rating.
With costs being paramount in everyone’s minds,
the respondents to our 6th Annual Consultants Survey gave occupancy and construction costs a 92.9 percent
importance rating, ranking this factor third — up
from sixth position in 2008 with an 87.1 importance
rating.
Availability of skilled labor, which is always a great concern, was ranked fourth by the responding consultants, with 92.2 percent importance rating. And it may
be that this year’s responding consultants are working
on build-to-suit projects for their clients because 90.8
percent of them rated availability of land as “very important” or “important,” ranking this factor sixth.
The “tax” factors — state and local incentives, tax exemp-
tions, and corporate tax rate — ranked fifth, eighth, and
tenth, with respective importance ratings of 92 per-
cent, 89.6 percent, and 87.4 percent.
When asked separately about incentives, 44 percent
of the respondents to our 2009 Consultants Survey
said incentives are now more important than in the
past (Chart Q). Slightly less than half said tax incen-
