Tag Archive for: greater fort lauderdale alliance

Corporate Barter Company Adds Square Footage, Jobs At Fort Lauderdale Office

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A corporate barter company will hire as many as 75 additional employees in South Florida as it increases its presence in Fort Lauderdale.

Greenwich, Connecticut-headquartered Icon International currently employs 54 people at its 15,369-square-foot office on the third floor of the Plaza at Las Olas at 301 East Las Olas Blvd. The company will expand into an 8,220-square-foot space on the eighth floor this summer, stated Serena Coons, Icon’s project manager in Fort Lauderdale.

Once the new jobs are filled, Icon’s Fort Lauderdale operation will have 129 employees.

Icon’s local office houses the company’s media teams (digital, national, and local), accounting team, and sales team.

Founded 35 years ago, Icon International specializes in corporate barter, a sector in which companies exchange undervalued or surplus inventory, capital goods, real estate, or “other assets that aren’t performing or providing ROI [return on investment],” according to the company’s website.

The Greater Fort Lauderdale Alliance, a nonprofit organization dedicated to attracting companies to Broward County, has been courting Icon International to open an office in Broward since 2019, said Maggie Gunther, GFLA’s VP of marketing and communications.

Icon International initially opened a satellite office in the Cypress Center at 6600 N. Andrews Ave. in May 2019, when it was still a subsidiary of New York-based Omnicom Group. In June 2021, Omnicom divested itself of Icon International.
Source:  SFBJ

Hong Kong-Based Company Moving US Headquarters To South Florida

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Techtronic Industries — the maker of many tools and popular appliance brands — is moving its U.S. headquarters to Fort Lauderdale, which business development officials say is another corporate headquarters win for the region.

The Hong Kong-based company is behind brands such as Ryobi and Milwaukee power tools, as well as Hoover, Oreck and Dirt Devil vacuum cleaners.

The company, which employs more than 20,000 worldwide, has leased offices at 450 E. Las Olas Blvd. and plans to create 75 jobs, according to the Greater Fort Lauderdale Alliance, the county’s economic development group. Techtronic, which was previously based outside Baltimore, is moving some top executives to Fort Lauderdale and hiring for finance, human resources, audit, legal and other professional jobs.

Techtronic’s biggest customer is Home Depot. The company also makes and sells brands including Vax, AEG, Stiletto, HomeLite and Empire.

Kristine Zenkewicz, assistant general counsel for Techtronic Industries North America, said the Fort Lauderdale office will be a corporate one overseeing U. S. operations. The global company has more than 40 locations around the world including the U.S., Canada, Asia, Europe and South America.

“We thought Fort Lauderdale would be a fabulous place to host clients, investors and team members,” she said.

Techtronic is a “powerhouse group of companies,” said Bob Swindell, president and CEO of the Greater Fort Lauderdale Alliance.

He said attracting a corporate headquarters is “incredibly important” to Broward because it brings high-paying jobs and tends to invest in the community.

Swindell said Broward County was competing with Miami and New England to attract the headquarters. One factor was hangar space for the company’s corporate aircraft, which it secured at the Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport. The company’s top executives frequently travel overseas, he said.

The company is renovating and will be moving into the 15th floor of 450 E. Las Olas Blvd., the same building where the late entrepreneur H. Wayne Huizenga once had his office.

In November, state and local government incentive awards totaling $210,000 were approved for the company, if it meets job and investment requirements. In October, the Fort Lauderdale Commission agreed to provide tax refunds of $7,000 per job for at least 30 jobs with average annual salaries of $97,374, according to a memo from City Manager Lee Feldman.

The incentives were awarded to help ensure the company relocation wouldn’t be lost to New England, where Techtronic has its current U.S. headquarters, or Miami, according to the memo.

Techtronic was founded in 1985 by Horst Julius Pudwill and Roy Chi Ping Chung with the goal of building a portfolio of globally recognized brands, according to the company’s site. It opened its first factory in 1988 in Dongguan, China.

Based in Hong Kong, Techtronic reported 2018 revenue of more than $7 billion, up from $6 billion a year earlier. The CEO is Joseph Galli Jr., who is renting while he builds a home in the Fort Lauderdale area, according to Zenkewicz.

The company is listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Techtronic’s stock also is traded in the U.S. over-the-counter market, where it has a 52-week stock price range of $22.52 to $38.72 a share.

 

Source:  SunSentinel

Medical Air Transport Company Moves HQ To Broward

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After recently moving its worldwide headquarters to Fort Lauderdale from outh Lake, Texas, medical air transportation company MASA Global has acquired an office building in Plantation for $12.85 million.

Cornerstone Condominium Investors, managed by Stacey Vogel, sold the 61,362-square-foot office building at 1250 S. Pine Island Road to MASA Property Management, an affiliate of MASA Global. (MASA stands for Medical Air Services Association.) The buyer received a $10.5 million mortgage from Valley National Bank.

The price equated to $209 a square foot.

The office building was constructed on the 2.1-acre site in 2008. It’s just north of busy Interstate 595.

MASA Global’s interest in Broward County was revealed in April 2017, when the Business Journal wrote that the company – under the name “Project Bogey” – filed a job growth incentive application to open an office in Fort Lauderdale. At the time, its headquarters were in South Lake, Texas.

State records show that, in August 2017, MASA Global was approved for up to $210,000 in Qualified Target Industry (QTI) incentives from the state and local governments, should it meet the goal of creating 35 jobs in Broward with an average wage of $71,789. Those jobs must be maintained through 2022.

Maggie Gunther, spokesperson for the Greater Fort Lauderdale Alliance, which helped MASA Global reach the QTI deal, said the project was approved for Fort Lauderdale and no incentives have been paid out to date.

On its website, MASA Global’s worldwide headquarters is now listed as 101 N.E. Third Ave., Suite 1600 in Fort Lauderdale. It still has a membership office in South Lake, Texas. The company has over 1 million members worldwide who depend on it to fly them to medical centers for emergency care. Many of its satellite offices are in Latin America and the Caribbean, which are easily reachable through South Florida airports.

 

Source:  SFBJ