San Antonio’s regional economic development organization cast a wide net in 2023, making contact with more than 1,200 companies across the globe looking to expand or relocate.
The goal was an audacious one, acknowledged Sarah Carabias Rush, chief economic development officer for Greater:SATX, and she was quick to emphasize that these weren’t random cold calls, but within the industries and locations targeted by the organization.
“This year was about changing the conversation within our team to this proactive mindset and making sure that we were getting in front of global companies directly,” said Carabias Rush, who sat down with the San Antonio Report recently to talk about Greater:SATX’s corporate recruitment strategy, the goals around recent international trips and why 2024 will bring a narrower focus.
Carabias Rush is wrapping up her second year with Greater:SATX. She spent 18 years climbing the ranks at the Dallas Regional Chamber; when she departed in January 2022, she was leading corporate recruitment, international engagement and leadership development programs for that chamber.
She arrived in San Antonio just months after CEO Jenna Saucedo-Herrera announced that the San Antonio Economic Development Foundation, which she has helmed since 2016, would become Greater:SATX Regional Economic Partnership. Earlier in 2021, the organization announced a campaign to raise $38.5 million over five years, a goal leaders said is on track based on annual fundraising milestones, largely from private sector pledges.
Those efforts appear to be paying off.
In October, the organization announced its biggest win to date: JCB, the world’s largest privately owned construction and agricultural equipment maker, plans to build a 720,000-square-foot facility on the city’s South Side that could employ more than 1,500 people within five years.
The deal took months to close, requiring close collaboration among Greater:SATX, the City of San Antonio, Bexar County and the state of Texas. Richard Fox-Marrs, president and CEO of JCB North America, credited that team effort for its decision to choose San Antonio.
“Everyone here should be delighted with the leadership” who made the deal happen, he said the day of the announcement.
From reactive to proactive
Carabias Rush said Greater:SATX had historically done a “fantastic” job of responding when approached by outside consultants hired by companies looking to expand or relocate, but had been less successful making proactive pitches to lure businesses to the area.
She also felt her colleagues were wearing too many hats.
“That’s been the critical transition for us over the past year,” she said, “… allowing the business development team to focus solely on talking to companies and telling our story early, so companies are thinking of San Antonio when they go into the decision-making process versus us trying to come from behind.”
She identified Greater:SATX’s trips to Monterrey, Mexico, and Seoul, South Korea, this year as examples of that proactive corporate recruitment effort.
In the case of Monterrey, with which San Antonio has had a sister-city relationship for 70 years, Carabias Rush said many manufacturers in the San Antonio region have supply chains that reach into Northern Mexico. “So we’ve started to look at that as a complementary labor market.”
Toward that end, leaders with UTSA and Tecnológico de Monterrey signed an agreement during that early October trip to create an international dual graduate degree program in cybersecurity that will allow students to take courses at both institutions, earn two degrees and be eligible to work in both countries.
Carabias Rush said Greater:SATX’s goal on that trip was to formalize and strengthen the future of bilateral trade and workforce among the mega-region and support companies already doing business in the region.
The trip to South Korea later in October included representatives from the City of San Antonio, CPS Energy, Port San Antonio, Brooks and OCI Solar Power, which is headquartered in San Antonio and whose parent company, OCI Holdings, is based in Seoul.
Carabias Rush said the delegation met with 25 companies in five days, including OCI Holdings, which recently spun off another company, OCI, that will focus on developing materials for semiconductors and batteries.
The semiconductor industry offers great potential for San Antonio, said Carabias Rush. Texas ranks second in the U.S. for semiconductor manufacturing firms calling the state home and is the top semiconductor exporter, according to Gov. Greg Abbott’s Texas Economic Development & Tourism Office.
Texas Instruments is headquartered in Dallas, and Samsung is expanding its semiconductor fabrication in the Austin area. In San Antonio, TowerJazz, an Israeli company, acquired a fabrication facility in San Antonio in 2016.
As with the automotive industry, Carabias Rush said, semiconductor fabricators need their supply chains nearby to make the product financially viable. Greater:SATX is currently doing what it calls “supply chain mapping” to see what opportunities might exist in the San Antonio region.
“I would not be surprised if we saw continued growth from OCI in that space,” she said.
Looking ahead to 2024
In 2024, Carabias Rush said the business development team will push the most promising leads of 2023 farther down the sales funnel. She identified 66 active projects the team will nurture, which Greater:SATX said represents the potential to create almost 20,000 new jobs and $15 billion in new capital investment.
Roughly 40% of Greater:SATX’s economic development budget is earmarked for international activities, Carabias Rush said; almost two-thirds of the companies the organization is focused on are located in Japan, the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany and South Korea.
Travel to those locations in the coming year will deepen San Antonio’s existing ties; local leaders understand that it can take decades for those relationships to result in tangible economic development. Carabias Rush said Greater:SATX will continue to travel with Abbott’s economic development office as well as make its own trips abroad.
As part of that effort, Greater:SATX will continue its push to add more international nonstop destinations at San Antonio International Airport, an effort aided by its air service development fund and the city’s decision to double fee waivers, from 50% to 100% for airlines in their second year of service for certain unserved international routes.
The airport will add direct flights to Torreón, Mexico, by the middle of 2024; a nonstop to Santiago de Querétaro began Dec. 1. Nonstops to the UK and Canada are now Greater:SATX’s top international goals, Carabias Rush said, while on the domestic front, a nonstop to Washington, D.C., remains a top goal.
Poised for a productive 2024, Carabias Rush said narrowing her team’s focus “allows us to be really intentional about how and who we’re spending our time with.”
