< Previous38 ARKANSAS ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT GUIDE our international companies have created about 1,600 new jobs in Arkansas in the past year, and combined they invested $425 million in the state. They are Norwegian packaging company Elopak ($70 million, 100 jobs in Little Rock), French aerospace company Dassault Falcon ($100 million, 800 jobs also in Little Rock), German firearms maker Walther Manufacturing ($30 million, 76 jobs in Fort Smith) and another German firearms and ammunition producer, SIG Sauer ($225 million, 675 jobs in Jacksonville). They’re in good company. Arkansas is home to nearly 530 international companies that employ 59,100 workers, according to the Global Business Alliance (GBA), which tracks foreign direct investment (FDI) on the national and state levels. Nearly 31,000 of those workers are employed in manufacturing — that’s 52% of all FDI employment. From 2016 to 2021, FDI employment in Arkansas jumped 30%. Overall private-sector employment grew 2% during that time. “From Dassault Falcon Jet to L’Oréal, French-headquartered companies have by MARK AREND F International Appeal: Arkansas Gaining Momentum in FDI INTERNATIONAL APPEAL French aircraft manufacturer Dassault Falcon is investing $100 million at its complex in Little Rock for completion and delivery of its new Falcon 6X business jet. Photo courtesy of Dassault AviationARKANSAS ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT GUIDE 39 found a home in Little Rock. It’s an example of how important cross-border connections are for great-paying jobs in communities across the country,” says GBA Executive Vice President Jonathan Samford. Business Roundtable, citing data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Uniworld BP database of Foreign Firms Operating in the United States, reports the top five countries with companies employing Arkansans as the United Kingdom (6,900 workers), France (6,300), Japan (6,100), Switzerland (4,800) and Canada (3,500). “Global investment is crucial for creating well-paying jobs in the Natural State,” adds Samford. “Most international companies in Arkansas come from countries that share our democratic values — including the United Kingdom, France and Switzerland. We must continue to support policies that encourage more of these firms to invest and create great- paying jobs here in America.” Regional Growth Accelerator Elopak’s Little Rock plant will produce cartons for dairy, juice and other food products. “Little Rock was a strategic and natural choice for us,” said Lionel Ettedgui, Elopak’s executive vice president for North America, in a statement. “This location will provide us with green energy, solid access to suppliers, a great transportation network by road and by train, and will enable Elopak to better serve our customers in the Americas and accelerate growth in the region.” Also in Little Rock, Dassault Falcon is expanding its facilities — the aerospace company’s largest in the world — to accommodate completion and delivery of its new Falcon 6X business jet. Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders and state officials met with Dassault Falcon executives at the Paris Air Show in June 2023, setting the stage for the December 12, 2023, project announcement. The company has had operations at Little Rock’s airport since 1975. “Today’s announcement cements Arkansas’ role as an aerospace powerhouse, growing our state’s largest export industry by 800 new jobs,” said Gov. Sanders. “I’m grateful to Dassault’s leadership for doubling down on their investment in Central Arkansas and will keep cutting taxes, growing our workforce and improving our schools to help Arkansas’ aerospace industry continue to expand.” A Firearms-Friendly Choice Firearms maker Walther Manufacturing is adding 40,000 square feet to its 185,000 square foot facility in Fort Smith, an investment the governor also attributes to meeting with the German manufacturer on a 2023 trade mission. “Arkansas is proud to be home to Walther U.S. headquarters, both because we love jobs and because we love our Second Amendment,” she noted in a January 2024 statement. “After meeting with the company during my European trade mission this summer, I’m thrilled they’ve decided to double down on their investment and grow their facility here in the Natural State, helping Fort Smith and the entire River Valley grow.” Fellow German firearms manufacturer SIG Sauer announced plans in October 2023 to invest $150 million and create 625 new jobs at its ammunition production facility in Jacksonville where about 350 people work. SIG Sauer later increased this investment to $225 million and boosted the job count to 675. The company says it will be investing in “component hybrid case manufacturing, primer manufacturing and load/pack operations to support multiple contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense.” The new, 210,000 square foot. Jacksonville Arkansas Ammunition Center opened on October 11, 2024. 40 ARKANSAS ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT GUIDE Rendering of Walmart’s new corporate headquarters campus in Bentonville. Photo courtesy of Walmart ollectively, the four Arkansas companies featured in the 2024 Fortune 500 saw more than $733 billion in revenue in 2023 and employed more than 2.2 million people — that’s more than 7.3% of the entire Fortune 500’s employment base. Those totals are helped by the fact that No. 1 on the publication’s annual list is Bentonville-based Walmart, with 2.1 million employees and more than $648 billion in revenue alongside a comparatively modest profit of $15.5 billion. The other three? No. 85 Tyson Foods, based in Springdale; No. 214 Murphy USA, based in El Dorado; and No. 316 J.B. Hunt Transport Services, based in Lowell but visible up and down the highways of the United States. So are Murphy USA’s fuel and convenience stores — most of them conveniently located near (but not owned by) a Walmart store. Among tens of thousands of major corporate facility projects worldwide recorded in Site Selection magazine’s global Conway Projects database in the decade between September 1, 2014, and September 1, 2024, Walmart and Tyson Foods alone have combined for 129 of them, with several of them in their home state. Hey, It’s Good to Be Back Home Again If you go looking for news about Walmart’s headquarters, you won’t find much. That’s because the company calls it the “home office” for a reason reinforced C FORTUNE 500 by ADAM BRUNS Led by No. 1 Walmart, these Fortune 500 firms find Arkansas feels like home. The Fantastic Four42 ARKANSAS ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT GUIDE by the massive new 12-building home office campus under construction in Bentonville: Leaders want employees to feel at home. That feeling starts with the warm feel and sustainable efficiency of mass timber construction and continues throughout the campus design, including buildings with names like Upstream, Together, Change and Sparky. Based on a cluster of neighborhoods and developed to integrate with the surrounding community, that design has followed three principles that could easily serve as economic development principles for the company’s home state: 1. Create a winning work environment. 2. Stay true to who we are. 3. Nurture people and place. Projected to be ready for move-in in 2025, the 350-acre site will feature: • The 200,000 square foot Sam Walton Hall, a place for convening, learning, celebrating and remembering that will contain artifacts such as Sam Walton’s first aircraft, a 1946 Ercoupe; • The 8th & Plate food hall, which will feature 12 restaurants, including regional favorite Ozark Mountain Bagel; • Food truck plazas and seven coffee shops, including collaborations with local roasters Airship, Heroes and Onyx, whose bike-though and bike- over coffee shop, The Camp @ Bud’s Preserve, will be located along the Razorback Greenway. Tyson Cultivates Solutions and Connections Ever since John W. Tyson and his family delivered farm-raised chickens from his truck in the 1930s, Tyson has cultivated family ties of many types in Arkansas. That includes startups. In July, the company’s venture capital arm Tyson Ventures hosted its third annual pitch event, welcoming 12 companies from seven states, Canada and the UK to present their supply chain-related innovations, ultimately choosing five of them for continued talks with the business. “Transformational solutions come from all over, and to see so much strategic potential in one place was inspiring,” said Heidi Solomon, vice president of global strategy for Tyson Foods, in a release. “When protein supply chains become more efficient, we can all do more to feed the world like family and fulfill our corporate mission. The global reach and scale of Tyson Foods can help these companies apply their groundbreaking solutions to make a difference.” Tyson Ventures has invested more than $100 million in emerging proteins, new technologies for food and worker safety and improved food production since it launched in 2016. J.B. Hunt is Innovating J.B. Hunt Transport Services Inc. (JBHT) is a component of the Dow Jones Transportation Average. The company’s services include intermodal, dedicated, refrigerated, truckload, less-than-truckload, flatbed, single- source, last-mile, transload and other shipping options. Recently, the company announced two new expansions and innovations. On September 27, 2024, JBHT announced that it had added 20 new Nikola Tre fuel cell electric vehicles to its fleet to expand sustainability solutions for its customers along the West Coast. On October 2, 2024, JBHT announced the establishment of its first- ever Logistics Venture Lab (LVL). The logistics and freight-focused arm will aim to launch as many as six startups over the next three years to solve “core strategic challenges within the industry,” the company said. “The startups, the first of which the companies target to begin launching in 2025, are inspired by opportunities to drive efficiency and solve common problems faced by providers in the logistics and freight transportation space.” Murphy USA Adds to Portfolio Murphy USA is a nationwide chain of fuel and convenience stores that now has more than 1,700 locations in 27 states — mostly in the Southeast, Southwest, Midwest and Northeast. During a recent earnings call, the company that began in 1996 announced that it was continuing a solid growth course, adding 40 new stores and remodeling another 47 stores in 2024 and 2025. In January 2021, Murphy acquired the QuickCheck brand to bolster its portfolio. “Our efforts to frontload our real estate pipeline have paid off as we’ve seen more stores exit the permitting process than expected,” President and CEO Andrew Clyde said on the earnings call. “As such, we are updating our (capital expenditure) projections for the year as we take advantage of this beneficial timing.” Murphy currently ranks No. 4 on the CSP Top 202 ranking of U.S. convenience store companies by total store count. Tyson Foods World Headquarters, Springdale, Arkansas Photo courtesy of Tyson FoodsBuilding Top-Tier Talent in Arkansas ARKANSAS ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT GUIDE 43 rkansas is transforming its workforce development strategy with a bold reorganization. Last March, the Arkansas Department of Commerce’s Division of Workforce Services was restructured into three new divisions: Re-employment, Arkansas Workforce Connections and Workforce Policy & Innovation. is new framework is designed to establish a seamless system where job training, career development and re-employment services work together more eff ectively while increasing outreach. At the forefront of this transformation is Cody Waits, the inaugural director of the Arkansas Workforce Connections division. After serving as the director of the Arkansas Offi ce of Skills Development, a division of the Department of Commerce, from to and as deputy director of the Department of Career Education from to , Waits brings years of experience in workforce development to the table. Yet he says this career found him by chance. A Fort Smith native, Waits is driven by the ability to create solutions that yield positive results for the state of Arkansas. In this interview, he shares insights into how this new division plans to accomplish that. How would you describe the Arkansas workforce? CODY WAITS: Growing! Additionally, the Arkansas workforce is more technically trained and skilled than ever before. We just announced another increase in our labor force participation rate this month, moving it up to .%, which represents an increase from .% in September of . e Arkansas workforce is also very resilient, hardworking, and people in Arkansas want to work. A WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT Workforce development leaders met at the annual Arkansas Workforce Innovation & Opportunity Act (WIOA) Conference in Little Rock in November 2024. Photo courtesy of AEDC44 ARKANSAS ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT GUIDE In which industries are you seeing the highest demand for skilled workers? WAITS: There’s demand everywhere right now whether it is manufacturing, construction, transportation, health care or IT and others that I could certainly continue to list. The good news? If you want a job, there is plenty of opportunity available here in Arkansas, and what is exciting is how we continue to expand the businesses that are currently here and attract new businesses to the state. The Arkansas Economic Development Commission is doing a great job on that front. Now we have to continue building the workforce to make their job easier. What specific workforce challenges does Arkansas face today, and how are you addressing them? WAITS: It’s just math at this point. We need more workers in the workforce, which is why we are proud to see that our labor force participation is continuing to move in the right direction. We have a goal to increase our labor force participation rate by another 48,000 Arkansans by 2028, which would move our labor force participation rate closer to 60%. In order to do that, we have to continue to invest in career and technical education — which is our pipeline — and identify the adult populations that are on the sideline for whatever reason and get them back into the workforce. What are the Arkansas Workforce Connections division’s key priorities and initiatives currently? WAITS: Realignment of our organization is currently in process with some aspects already completed. We are in the final stages now of bringing over the last division which will represent our business engagement strategy focusing on how we strategically support all programs underneath the Workforce Connections umbrella with one group leading our business engagement efforts. Historically, we had many different business engagement groups housed within the different agencies under Workforce Connections, which created a lot of duplication, less than desirable outcomes and lots of redundancies. Another priority is increasing the amount of funding being granted to local workforce development boards for training via the Office of Employment & Training, which houses our Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) funding. These are federal funds that we want to see spent more on training Arkansans who are in search of work and seeking to upskill or reskill themselves into a family sustaining career. Many times, these funds get spent on administrative costs. We understand some percentage has to be spent on administrative expenses, but we know we can get more funds to our local workforce development board partners to fund training efforts, which helps our institutions of higher education as our primary training providers in the state but also helps the entire ecosystem when we spend more money on training. One more priority is building the pipeline of workers from K-12 Career and technical education programs via the Office of Skills Development, which has historically been the agency that funds most workforce development projects in the state. They also operate as the State of Arkansas’ office of apprenticeship and oversee, in coordination with the Department of Education, the secondary career and technical education centers. The Secondary Career Centers are witnessing increases in enrollments in our programs of study that align with workforce and economic development priorities to the point that we had north of a 20% increase in enrollment. The strategies that have been put into action to help students get more accustomed to what these careers look like such as Be Pro Be Proud and investments in virtual reality that we have made over the past few years have really paid off, and we don’t intend on slowing down. Could you share some examples of partnerships with local institutions of higher education to develop training programs? WAITS: We work closely with institutions of higher education across the state of Arkansas, whether that be community colleges, four-year universities or Northwest Technical Institute. In Arkansas, we have the University of Arkansas system, the Arkansas State University system and many independent universities that we collaborate with on several different projects where we provide funding and support to establish curriculum, fund equipment purchases or provide consultative services. The Fiber Broadband Academy, a partnership with three community colleges, is one I would point to, and the Arkansas Steelmaking Academy in partnership with Arkansas Northeastern College in Blytheville (Mississippi County). This area has become the largest steel producing county in the nation and we have established the steelmaking academy to support that industry. South Arkansas University Tech has been a strong partner of ours in supporting the defense industry in south Arkansas. We have supported the development, funding and equipping of their training programs as well as apprenticeship programs in the region. Northwest Technical Institute will soon be the premier location for Ammonia Refrigeration and Boiler Training in Northwest Arkansas. Industry, state, and local partnerships have invested significantly in the development of this facility and in a few short months it will be a destination for all employers in the state of Arkansas and across the U.S. for companies to access high-quality training in these areas. How does your division collaborate with industry leaders and local businesses to ensure workers are equipped with the right skills? WAITS: We host employer forums and meet with businesses regularly to understand what the industry trends are currently, and what type of technology may be installed in the next 12 to 24 months. Everything we do is employer driven and anything we fund must have private sector input and partnerships. The other aspect of this is our extensive relationships with industry associations such as the Trucking Association, Association of Builders & Contractors, Associated Industries of Arkansas, Hospital and Healthcare Associations, etc. Their input is invaluable to our organization. Additionally, the Career Education Workforce Development Board as well as the State Workforce Development Board are industry driven in membership. We routinely reach out to those industry professionals to understand dynamics of the industry prior to committing to certain projects. We need that industry input, and they are the ones that can either give us the answer directly or put us in touch with someone who knows the answer. ARKANSAS ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT GUIDE 4546 ARKANSAS ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT GUIDE rom the state’s most populated metropolitans, to smaller communities, new and expanding companies are finding a place for themselves in diverse communities across Arkansas. In a state known for its favorable tax rates, lower cost of living and housing, logistics capabilities and natural resources, this round-up of advantages paints a clear picture as to why Arkansas secured 41 capital investment projects in 2023. With initiatives ranging from steel and wood products to advanced manufacturing and food production, multiple sectors of the state’s economy grew alongside its communities over the last year. Look at any of the state’s regions and see for yourself. An economic landscape that enables success. by LINDSAY LOPP F Arkansas: Naturally Built for Business REGIONAL BUSINESS BUILDING Downtown Jonesboro Photo courtesy of Arkansas Department of Parks, Heritage and TourismARKANSAS ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT GUIDE 47 SOUTH ARKANSAS While southern Arkansas might be known for its small-town charm and easy-going atmosphere, its economy is anything but slow-paced. From Hot Springs to El Dorado, the communities spanning the lower half of the state are bustling with business opportunity, incited by their resource- rich environment. The abundance of timber, oil and fertile farmland located in the area has given way to robust industry sectors that continually attract major investments. In August, Canfor Corporation, a global leader in producing sustainable wood-building solutions, acquired the Resolute El Dorado Inc. lumber manufacturing facility in Union County for $73 million. The plant is also anticipated to receive an additional $50 million in upgrades to increase the company’s production capacity to 175 million board feet annually. “The acquisition, together with the intended investment and expansion in the mill, is a strategic opportunity for us,” said Lee Goodloe, president of Canfor Southern Pine. “As a growth- oriented forest products company, we see this as an opportunity to expand the depth and breadth of our manufacturing capabilities in Arkansas’ rich, high- quality wood basket and to provide our customers with a more comprehensive product offering.” Renamed the Iron Mountain sawmill, this facility was selected to complement the company’s existing operations in the region, including its El Dorado Laminating Plant and its nearby Urbana sawmill, which recently underwent a $130 million upgrade and expansion. In addition to lumber investments, the region has also recently secured significant expansions in the food and beverage industry. Hope Baking Company is investing more than $37 million to expand its food manufacturing facility in Hope, creating 266 new jobs (see p. 22 of this guide). And Hostess Brands completed construction of its new 330,000-square foot facility in Arkadelphia in late 2023, hiring more than 150 workers. NORTHEAST ARKANSAS Over the last decade, Northeast Arkansas has attracted a slew of significant investments from global steel manufacturers. Key companies such as U.S. Steel, Nucor and Zekelman have built advanced mills in the area, annually producing millions of tons of steel vital to various industries. Essential and rapidly growing industries such as energy, automotive and construction rely on the products these companies produce, emphasizing the important role Northeast Arkansas plays in several sectors of the American economy. Like many locations across Arkansas, the Northeast region is exceptionally well connected. Not only is it situated along the Mississippi River, but its communities have access to three Class I rail systems, increasing the cost- effectiveness and efficiency of product distribution. Arkansas State Capitol Building, Little Rock. Photo courtesy of Arkansas Department of Parks, Heritage and TourismNext >