The US state of Texas is placing UK companies in its crosshairs with the launch this month of a devoted London office to lure jobs and investment to the low-tax Lone Star State.
Texas not too long ago secured approval for the brand new website, including to a rising checklist of worldwide workplaces from which it will probably attempt to draw company heavyweights throughout its borders.
It is the newest signal that Texas lobbyists, led by the office of the state’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, are widening their financial ambitions past American borders, having already had success luring jobs and investment from rival US states together with California, Delaware and New York.
Lobbyists working within the London office are probably to court docket UK bosses with incentives together with new, fast-track enterprise courts and multimillion greenback subsidies. Texas fees neither company nor earnings tax.
Their targets are anticipated to embody the City’s banks and investment homes, because the state goals to construct on Dallas’s financial-sector growth, and proceed its promotion of the area now known as Y’all Street.
Those ambitions have caught the eye of the City of London Corporation. The City’s mayor, Susan Langley, travelled to Dallas in February and mentioned how London might faucet into pleasure over the launch later this 12 months of the state’s first devoted inventory market, the TXSE. “With the launch of the Texas Stock Exchange, new dual-listing opportunities could connect British and Texan firms to fresh capital,” she said in a post on X after the visit.
The information comes as London tries to reverse a development the place companies have been abandoning the UK inventory market, selecting both to go non-public or shift their listings to hubs abroad, together with New York.
The London office – which can add to Texas’s workplaces in Mexico and Taiwan – will probably be led by James Taylor, one of many founders of the Austin-based lobbying and public relations agency Vianovo.
Linda McMahon, the pinnacle of the Dallas Economic Development Corporation, will probably be a part of a delegation of native lobbyists travelling to London this month to mark the launch in mid-April. She instructed the Guardian that Texas already had a robust report in bringing worldwide companies into its borders.
“I’m working with a company that wants to move manufacturing here from the Netherlands,” she stated. “I met with companies that want to move manufacturing from Ukraine, [and] we’ve got an enormous amount of Chinese and Korean influence here.”
Strong enterprise lobbying efforts have already helped Texas to overtake California in having the biggest variety of Fortune 500 firm headquarters of any American state. These embody the headquarters of Oracle, which moved from Silicon Valley to Austin in 2020, and three of Elon Musk’s ventures – Tesla, X Corp, SpaceX – all of which moved from California in recent times. ExxonMobil is the newest win, with the oil firm asserting final month it will shift its base to Texas from New Jersey.
“We’ve got the makeup, we’ve [got] the ingredients to continue to push and grow our international footprint,” Mike Rosa, a senior vice-president of the Dallas Regional Chambers enterprise foyer group, instructed the Guardian final month. “But I don’t know that Dallas is necessarily branded or known for the level of international activity that we have.”
A spokesperson for Abbott’s office stated: “Texas has long had a global presence, with offices in Mexico and most recently in Taiwan designed to attract foreign direct investment and job creation into Texas, while also helping Texas companies export worldwide.
“These offices operate under the Texas Economic Development and Tourism Office, in the office of Greg Abbott. We look forward to sharing more information on future expansion soon.”
