As multinational companies expand their real estate portfolios across continents, the challenge of obtaining reliable, actionable data becomes one of the most significant barriers to strategic decision-making. Veteran corporate real estate professional Leandro Rovai offers his perspective on how to surmount that barrier.
ElementUSA CEO Ellis Sullivan says his team didn’t set out to become a waste-to-mineral company. Now, helped by a nearly $30 million award from the U.S. Department of War, the company a demonstration facility to extract gallium and scandium in Gramercy. Two months prior, ElementUSA launched a Critical Resource Accelerator in Cedar Park, Texas.
Aluminum company Novelis, a subsidiary of Hindalco Industries Limited, the metals flagship company of the India-based Aditya Birla Group, this week produced the first coil on the cold mill at its $5 billion aluminum recycling and rolling plant in Bay Minette, Alabama — the first fully integrated aluminum recycling and rolling plant to be built in the United States in more than 40 years. “When fully operational, the facility will add 600 kilotonnes of annual rolled aluminum capacity to serve beverage packaging, automotive and specialty product markets,” the company stated. “The plant also includes a recycling center that will be capable of processing more than 15 billion used beverage cans annually.”
“Producing the first coil on the cold mill is an important step in commissioning Bay Minette and increasing the supply of rolled aluminum in the United States,” said Steve Fisher, president and CEO of Novelis. “With the North American market being capacity constrained, this investment will help Novelis meet long-term market demand, strengthen our U.S. manufacturing footprint and increase the use of recycled content in our products.”
Technology is rapidly reshaping how communities identify opportunities, market locations and compete for investment.
The Economic Development Tech Summit, November 4–5 in Alpharetta, Georgia, will bring economic development professionals together to explore the tools driving that change — from AI and GIS to automation, data analytics and the evolving technology behind site selection.
Hosted by GIS WebTech, the two-day program is built around practical applications, interactive learning and conversations with industry peers about how technology can improve research, decision-making and business attraction efforts.
For economic developers, site selectors, researchers, GIS professionals and marketing teams, the Summit offers a timely look at where economic development technology is headed — and what it means for communities competing for the next generation of investment.
King White is the founder and president of Site Selection Group.
Recent Site Selection contributor King White, founder and president of Site Selection Group, in early September penned a commentary anyone involved with corporate real estate should read. “Every full-service commercial real estate firm makes the same pitch to a prospective tenant: one platform, every market, every service line, under one roof,” he writes in “One Building, Five Invoices: Inside the Full-Service CRE Model.” “What none of them show you is how much of that platform’s revenue depends on the other side of your lease.”
PHOTO OF THE DAY
Croatian automotive company Rimac Automobili recently played an integral role in the action above, as Red Bull athlete Dario Costa landed and then took off from a moving cargo container train travelling at 120 km/h (75 mph) with a Zivko Edge 540 aircraft in Türkiye.
“It was the late Felix Baumgartner [he of the incredible Space Jump] who first connected Costa with Rimac, recognizing in the team an engineering mindset that matched his own,” Rimac said. “Central to Costa’s preparation for the train landing was the Nevera R, driven in reverse at sustained high speed to generate the turbulence over its rear wing that Costa needed to replicate, in training, the disturbed air he would face on final approach. The Nevera R holds the outright world record for reverse speed in a production car, a capability that gave Costa a consistent, repeatable reference point no other vehicle could offer.”
Rimac Technology, a Tier 1 automotive supplier specializing in electrification technologies, this week went from adventure to new venture as it announced a partnership with digital infrastructure firm ECOBLOX to develop a modular data center solution that will be deployed first by November at Rimac’s facility near Zagreb.
