The Ultimate Driving Machine has turned out to be the ultimate driving machine of South Carolina's economy. A study released Thursday by USC's Moore School of Business looked at BMW's economic impact on the state, and the results surprised even lead researcher Dr. Doug Woodward.
"From an economic perspective, the investment has been spectacular, and that's not a superlative I get to use too often these days," he says.
When BMW announced in 1992 that it would build an auto manufacturing plant in Greer, it promised 2,000 jobs and an economic investment of $500 million. It now employs 5,400 people at the plant and the economic investment has been $5 billion, the study found.
When researchers factored in the indirect jobs created by suppliers and companies that support BMW, the number of people employed because of BMW jumped to 23,050.
"It's a huge impact. $8.8 billion of impact in 2007, and it's going to be hard to find any other economic entity that even comes close to the kind of effect that BMW's having on our state, and it's spreading and rippling out throughout South Carolina," Woodward says.
And the growth is continuing. BMW announced earlier this year it will expand its plant, investing another $750 million. It will hire another 500 people once the expansion is complete.
BMW spokesman Bobby Hitt says, "Right now, we're in a period as we're building up the plant where we're not yet in hiring for the expansion. We're still a year or so away from that. We get a lot of applications and people can go on our website at bmwusfactory.com and there's a whole career section in there where they can apply."
Read the study.
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