Odyssey Logistics has a slogan: “Movement is life.”
No three words could better describe the logistics lifeblood of the Chicagoland and Illinois economies.
When we ran the numbers in Site Selection magazine’s proprietary Conway Projects Database to see where all major corporate end-user facility investments with a distribution function were located since January 2019, Chicagoland and its 1,186 projects beat out second-place Dallas-Fort Worth by more than 350 projects for No. 1 in the nation. That total comprised more than 92% of the Illinois total and brought the state to No. 2 in the nation behind Texas.
Not every project comes with a capital expenditure amount, but for those we could track, the Illinois total capex came to more than $10.1 billion in that time frame, creating more than 34,100 jobs and representing (again, for those projects where the figures were available) more than 210 million sq. ft. of space.
Odyssey, a Connecticut company with a $3 billion global freight network, started with five employees in chemical logistics 20 years ago and today serves 6,000 customers worldwide. The company in May 2024 celebrated the move to a new intermodal division regional headquarters office in the Chicagoland suburb of Lombard.
“This new Chicago-area office signifies our deep commitment to growing our North American operations,” said Hans Stig Moller, CEO of Odyssey Logistics. “It’s strategically located to leverage major transportation hubs, allowing us to deliver exceptional service to our clients while positioning us for future expansion.”
“After more than 40 years in business, and immense expansion to more than 110 locations across Asia, Europe and North America, we’re fortifying our roots in the Chicago area.”
— Vaughn Moore, AIT Chairman & CEO
Lombard is located in DuPage County, part of a multi-county metro region that encompasses a lot more than the City of Chicago’s Cook County. Broken down by county, here’s how the distribution facility investment activity is distributed in Illinois:
Broken down by city, the data speak volumes about which communities have the infrastructure for moving goods and for moving things along. All cities are in the Chicago metro area:
A Load of Projects
The pipeline of recent project activity includes the following:
AIT Worldwide Logistics, which originally opened for business in Chicagoland 45 years ago as Air-It-There, Inc., in January 2024 opened a new 370,000-sq.-ft. AIT-Chicago office and warehouse in Palatine that is near major Interstate highways, key intermodal terminals and Chicago O’Hare International Airport.
The new station — the largest in the company’s global network — consolidates suburban operations and support staff from locations in Wood Dale and Itasca, where the company in 2023 moved into a new global headquarters situated near the intersection of I-290 and the Elgin-O’Hare Expressway.
“After more than 40 years in business, and immense expansion to more than 110 locations across Asia, Europe and North America, we’re fortifying our roots in the Chicago area,” said AIT Chairman and CEO Vaughn Moore at the opening of the new HQ, which consolidates shared services staff from multiple other Itasca facilities. “Working together in this state-of-the-art office space allows us to be much more collaborative, enabling faster, real-time reactions,” he said in a release, noting that the building at 2 Pierce Place — the second-tallest building in Illinois outside the Chicago city limits — “also provides the additional space we need to accommodate the future growth of our shared services teams.”
CJ Logistics America is investing $150 million apiece and creating 160 jobs apiece at two new facilities in Elwood (Will County) and Des Plaines (Cook County).
Rendering courtesy of CJ Logistics America and Business Wire
At its own headquarters in the Cook County city of Des Plaines last year, CJ Logistics America — a business whose parent company is based in South Korea — announced a strategic partnership with the Korea Ocean Business Corporation (KOBC) to invest $457 million in its “North American Project” to construct three large-scale logistics centers containing more than 3.8 million sq. ft. in the United States.
As if proving the theory that the Second City is still first in goods movement, two of the three are in the Chicago area: one in Des Plaines and one in Elwood, located adjacent to the intermodal terminals of BNSF and Union Pacific in the logistics capital of Will County. The primary focus of the facilities is to handle “the import and export cargo of global and South Korean companies and e-commerce sellers, thereby supporting their market entry into the U.S.,” the companies stated.
“The construction of logistics hubs in the U.S. will enhance the competitiveness of South Korea’s global supply chain,” said Yang-soo Kim, CEO of KOBC, “and create value-added supply chain services through integration with maritime logistics.” In promoting the Elwood facility’s capabilities in July 2024, CJ Logistics noted that “as part of the nation’s largest inland port, we also operate an active Foreign Trade Zone (FTZ) at this site which makes it ideally situated to support global trade. From this prime central location our customers are able to reach up to 26% of the U.S. population within just two days.”
As recently as Q1 2023, the U.S. ranked as South Korea’s largest trade surplus country ($7.2 billion) while e-commerce exports to the U.S. reached $323 million in 2022, a 23.8% increase over 2021.
The lifeblood of the global logistics economy, it seems, moves with great dispatch through Illinois.
