They'll meet with 62 companies during the two-day visit, many of them companies with existing Austin operations such as chipmakers Intel Corp. and AMD Inc. "We want to know the things we need to be thinking about to help them expand in Austin," Saralee Tiede, a chamber spokeswoman, tells GlobeSt.com.
The chamber is seeking to increase the number of jobs in Austin and diversify the city's economy. Companies expecting a visit include 15 in semiconductor companies, 11 in biotechnology, nine in software, six in computers and peripherals, six in digital entertainment and five in technology commercialization.
It's been at least eight years since the chamber led such a trip to California. Austin business people made regular recruiting trips to the West Coast in the late 1980s and early 1990s when the city's economy was suffering through a bust. As the economy picked up in the '90s, attention turned more to dealing with problems of fast-paced growth and less with bringing in more businesses.
The chamber says that in the past five years the area's gross domestic product tripled, the number of high-tech jobs grew 91% and unemployment dipped as low as 1.6%. In the past year, however, there have been 24,000 layoffs, the unemployment rate has reached 4.5% and the office vacancy stood at 18.8% at the end of 2001.
The group will extol Central Texas's virtues, which include available office and industrial space; available workers; dependable utilities with lower-than-California rates; and lower-than-California taxes.
The real estate companies sending representatives on the trip are Colliers Oxford Commercial, NAI/Commercial Industrial Properties Co., Transwestern Commercial Services, CB Richard Ellis and Zydeco Development.
Just two high-tech companies–divine Inc., a software firm, and Biowalk, a biotech company–are on the manifest. Tiede says that several law firms making the trip have significant high-tech practices. The delegation includes high-level University of Texas officials: Larry Faulkner, president, and Juan Sanchez, vice president for research.
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