By Staff
Filter company moving corporate office from Florida
By TED STRONG
Staff Writer
The Flanders Corporation, a filter maker, will be bringing about 100 jobs to Washington from St. Petersburg, Fla.
The company plans to move its corporate office North to Washington over the next three months, Smith said.
The new corporate headquarters will be fully functional by the end of the year, he said. The customer service department already completed its move and started operations Monday, he said.
Flanders, a manufacturer of air filtration products is expected to do about $250 million in sales this year, said Brenda Davis, the company’s vice president of corporate human resources.
Many of the new jobs will be in accounting and not many people are following the company from Florida, Smith said.
He said the company is looking forward to using the talent of eastern North Carolina and to using the bricks-and-mortar facility it already has.
The customer service department has moved to one of the company’s two factories in the county, and the corporate headquarters will move to another.
The switch will cut overheard for expenses like insurance and upkeep that the company faced from the standalone office building it had in Florida, Smith said.
The company moved its headquarters to Florida in the late 1990s, after it bought another company with facilities there, Davis said.
The company, which trades on the Nasdaq exchange as FLDR, ended Thursday up $.40 at $6.50 per share.
The company has about 32,000 employees and operates 11 plants in the United States and Mexico, including five in North Carolina, Davis said.
Smith said that the changes are part of a restructuring at the company.
Washington Mayor Judy Meier Jennette was “pleasantly surprised by the news,” she said.
The county’s chief economic developer, Tom Thompson, declined to comment for this story.