Jim Fair
King Automation, an industrial automation engineering company, is leaving its Greer location at 113 Runion Road, as it expands its business into a vacant and larger, 80,000-square-foot warehouse in Roebuck.
King Automation, an industrial automation engineering company, will leave its Greer location at 113 Runion Road, adjacent to Greenville-Spartanburg, to move into a vacant and larger, 80,000-square-foot warehouse in Roebuck. The company will invest $40 million and expects to add 80 jobs over the next five years.
The company’s customers include BMW, Benteler, Magna, Mercedes-Benz, ThyssenKrupp, Volkswagen, Target and soon Toray, who is building a $1 billion manufacturing facility that is expected to create 500 new jobs over the next nine years.
“The key was there was no zoning and the cost of land close to Greer and Greenville is price prohibitive,” Elizabeth Belenchia, a consultant for Carroll Properties Corp., said. “The company wanted to stay close to the Upstate.”
Calls to the Greer Development Corporation for comment were not returned to GreerToday.com Friday or Monday.
King Automation specializes in designing, developing and maintaining manufacturing projects for the automotive industry and automating warehousing to serve logistics expansion among other related engineering services.
“(King Automation) needed a heavy duty building to hold cranes, a kind of staging place,” Belenchia said. “We found one that’s been vacant a couple of years.”
BMW’s on-time delivery will be an easy reach from Roebuck. “We’ve got lots of avenues to get there from Highway 101, 290, and the interstates,” Belenchia said. The CSX rail line services that location.
Russ Weber, board member of the Spartanburg Economic Futures Group, stated the purchase and renovation of the larger building “stands to breathe new life into a once vibrant manufacturing facility in the Roebuck community.”
Located at 4300 Stone Station Road, the new building will be retrofitted to incorporate energy efficient strategies, according to a S.C. Department of Commerce statement.
“This energy-efficient facility will allow us to continue and expand our services to automotive, textile, metalworking, food and beverage industries,” King Automation President Emerson Stobel said.