Category: News

Content pulled from a piece in the San Diego Business Journal: VAVi Faced Its Own Obstacle Course

EDC investor and recreational sporting events organizer VAVi Sport & Social Club was looking to make a big splash at its first major international competition: a 20,000-person obstacle course and race in Sydney, Australia. Little did VAVi know its shipment of inflatable obstacles would present its own set of obstacles.

The company loaded its $1 million worth of goods into shipping containers, set to arrive a month before the event. Complications arose in South Korea when VAVi’s equipment was unloaded and seemingly forgotten about on storage docks. This is when EDC came in…

Having been a part of the 2015 global export assistance program MetroConnect, VAVi CEO Steve Stoloff called on EDC and the organization’s World Trade Center team to leverage its international network for support. EDC staff contacted the U.S. Commercial Service – the trade promotion arm of the U.S. Department of Commerce – to ensure the forgotten equipment would be loaded onto another boat bound for Australia. Staff also reached out to contacts in Sydney to coordinate on-the-ground transportation from Brisbane to Sydney, since this new boat would no longer be porting in Sydney.

And it didn’t stop there. EDC’s board of directors stepped up to the challenge. Helping recover some of the money lost in the fuss, Linde Hotchkiss, managing partner at the global risk advisory and insurance solutions firm Willis Towers Watson, counseled VAVi on the qualms of international shipping and helped facilitate an insurance claim.

With all hands on deck, VAVi received its shipment and salvaged the prominent event – saving one-fifth of the company’s yearly projected sales. This is not simply a company story of overcoming obstacles in going global, but of the collaborative nature of San Diego’s business community. This is who San Diego is.

This weekend, years of hard work came to life for BAE Systems and partners across the state as the Barrio Logan-based shipyard cut the ribbon on its new dry dock, the Pride of California.

At 950 feet long and capable of lifting nearly 55,000 tons, the dry dock is the largest in California and the third largest in the nation. Used for ship repair and construction, the dry dock is flooded to allow watercraft to float in and then drained so watercraft can be set on a dry platform for work.

EDC board member and BAE Vice President Bob Koerber joined Congressman Scott Peters, Congressman Duncan Hunter, Port Chairman Robert “Dukie” Valderrama and an audience of more than 150 senior military personnel for the event inside the dry dock’s 100-foot walls. The dry dock was shipped across the Pacific Ocean on a 7,000 mile, 60-day journey. It represents approximately $100 million in infrastructure investment from BAE to increase the shipyard’s capacity to meet the growing needs of the U.S. Navy.

BAE currently employs 2,000 workers in San Diego, with the dry dock anticipated to add more jobs over the next several years. BAE is a critical pillar of San Diego’s working waterfront, where the shipbuilding and ship repair industry employs approximately 12,000 San Diegans and has an economic impact of $1.75 billion annually throughout the county.

EDC was proud to support this monumental engineering project by working directly with BAE to craft a competitive application for the Cal Competes Tax Credit program, which they ultimately won. Awarded in 2015, BAE’s $1.55 million tax credit supports the shipyards ability to remain competitive and continue to invest in their yard and workforce.

With the rebalance to the Pacific, the U.S. Navy’s presence in San Diego will continue to grow dramatically over the next several years. The challenges associated with this growth include the ability for local industry to service, build, upgrade and repair the equipment for the influx of U.S. Navy vessels. With President Trump calling for the Navy to increase its current fleet to 350 ships, San Diego will be on the receiving end of increased spending.

“If you build it, they will come…” This mantra was true of the Field of Dreams, and now of San Diego’s burgeoning tech ecosystem.

Together with 35 of San Diego’s best and biggest tech companies, Innovate78 representatives joined the San Diego Venture Group’s Tacos + Tech in Silicon Valley last week. The event – appropriately held at the Computer History Museum – played host to more than 700 curious Bay Area engineers and programmers, and served to showcase the high-tech jobs and opportunities available across San Diego.

With a special focus on attracting Bay Area engineers, North County companies like ViaSat, Thermo Fisher Scientific and Verve, as well as other San Diego companies like Illumina, Dexcom, ResMed, Qualcomm, Human Longevity, Cubic, Hired and LoanHero set up shop at the job fair-like event. Company recruiters spoke to San Diego as the alternative to Northern California’s congested traffic, high cost of living, hyper-competitive workforce culture and other issues plaguing the region.

As a proud sponsor, the EDC-led economic development initiative Innovate78 represented North County at a booth, with leaders from the five cities along the 78 Corridor – Carlsbad, Escondido, Oceanside, San Marcos and Vista – at the helm. Conversations with attendees ranged from North County housing costs to the growing tech sector, to the many breweries that make up the ‘Hops Highway’ – one of the primary booths highlighting the region’s lifestyle.

While many attendees admitted connection to San Diego through family, school or dream vacations, it seemed as though the region’s tech ecosystem – which employs nearly 69,000 people – has flown under the radar. Tacos + Tech provided a platform for some of San Diego County’s top employers and innovators to attract Bay Area talent through simply sharing San Diego’s reality: a broad diversity of career opportunity mixed with a top-tier quality of life (and, of course, tacos and beer). For decades, San Diego has built this ecosystem, and now…the talent will most certainly come.

Tacos + Tech comes on the heels of SDVG’s Beachhead launch, a coworking space for San Diego entrepreneurs working out of Silicon Valley.

By Nikia Clarke, executive director of WTC San Diego and Peter Cowhey, interim executive vice chancellor for Academic Affairs at UC San Diego

During his first week in office President Trump made many bold moves, including an executive order to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a call to renegotiate NAFTA, and a threat to impose a 20 percent border tax on Mexican imports to the United States following a very public spat with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto.

Trade matters for economies, big and small. For a border city on the edge of the Pacific, decisions on trade policy in Washington have outsized impacts on jobs, growth and opportunities for San Diegans.

Take TPP — an international trade deal originally negotiated between the U.S. and 11 other countries, covering 40 percent of global GDP.

Right now, the status quo makes it more expensive for U.S. companies to export to other countries than it is for foreign companies to sell goods and services here. TPP sought to level the playing field, especially for the small and midsize companies that make up more than 95 percent of San Diego’s business ecosystem.

It also was the first trade deal to write the rule book for the economy of the future. It protected the intellectual property of American innovators, which matters when you live in the third most patent-intensive region in the world.

Scientific research and development, the heartbeat of our world-renowned life sciences ecosystem and an industry dependent on patents, is five times more concentrated here than in the U.S. as a whole.

TPP eased restrictions on the movement of data and services across borders, which is important when you have a globally competitive cybersecurity cluster and revolutionary big data and genomics industries.

In San Diego, innovation is our livelihood, and TPP would have been a game changer for all those San Diego companies that export their knowledge across the globe. Killing TPP effectively cedes leadership on trade rules and norms to China, an outcome that is unlikely to be advantageous for U.S. companies and consumers.

And don’t forget that 97 percent of our goods exports — primarily high-value manufactured goods worth over $22 billion — are already sold in TPP markets, employing over 120,000 San Diegans. Most of those goods are exported to Mexico, sometimes crossing the border several times before they are fully assembled. This means that 40 percent of the content of imports from Mexico — the ones subject to a potential 20 percent tax — is American-made.

As we pivot from what could have been with TPP and look to NAFTA renegotiation, to building a wall, to a looming trade conflict with China, we should remember that trade has always been an American reality.

Here in San Diego, we marvel at the transformation over the past 50 years from a sleepy Navy town to a global city that develops life-changing technologies. We didn’t get here by building walls, and we won’t get ahead that way either.

This op-ed originally ran in the San Diego Union-Tribune: “Trump’s trade moves impact San Diego economy“

For more more on TPP and San Diego, see WTCSD’s economic impact report.

A 295,000 square foot addition to your home may not be on most people’s minds, but for a company with Illumina’s ambition, its par for the course. And today was yet another one of those days at one of San Diego’s largest life sciences companies. It also marked the culmination of a dynamic collaborative partnership to get things done.

Cutting the ribbon on the new addition to its corporate headquarters, Illumina President and CEO Francis deSouza, Executive Chairman Jay Flatley and other Illumina executives shared the stage with San Diego Mayor Faulconer to announce the opening of what is now among San Diego’s top five largest manufacturing centers. And yes, manufacturing in San Diego does include this genomics giant.

The state of the art facility will house 850 new R&D, oncology, reproductive and genetic health and manufacturing jobs. It will continue to fuel Illumina’s majority share of the world’s genetic sequencing market, producing both the sequencing machines and analytics its customers need to support innovative global healthcare applications.

EDC is proud to have been able to contribute toward making the new building a reality. Countless phone calls, meetings and exchanges alongside our partners at Alexandria Real Estate, Biocom, Cushman & Wakefield and the city of San Diego brokered the arrangement. After four years of collaborative work, led by California Assemblymember Todd Gloria and San Diego Mayor Faulconer, the art of the possible (that new home addition) is today a shiny, ambitious new reality for San Diego.

Next up for the company and San Diego – Another 316,000 square foot addition due to open this July.

Economic Pulse – January 2017

Understanding our economy begins with strong data – it’s a phrase people hear us say a lot at San Diego Regional EDC, and for good reason.

Unemployment data, while important, only gives us a piece of the puzzle and many people are still curious as to how it all relates to them…as a business…as a job seeker…and as a San Diego resident.

As we kick off 2017, we want to provide comprehensive research that tells a story about our economy. San Diego’s Economic Pulse, our new research product launching today, is our way of doing that. In addition to tracking unemployment, we will also be keeping tabs on new business establishments, job postings and looking at who’s hiring in San Diego.

This research wouldn’t be possible without the generous support of EDC board officer Phil Blair and Manpower San Diego.

Throughout the year, you will continue to see changes in the way we present our research and talk about data. We would love to hear your thoughts. Join the conversation at @SDregionalEDC or send an email to research@sandiegobusiness.org.

See it Here

At the start of each year, Forbes recognizes young entrepreneurs, innovators and leaders across business, education, media and more. In the 2017 iteration, San Diego had strong representation across sectors, further solidifying our region as a world-class city where young talent thrives.

Introducing San Diego’s 20-something superstars listed in Forbes 2017…

• Chad Amonn, Cofounder, Inova Drone (manufacturing): Chad founded Inova Drone, a TechStars company developing small drones for commercial and governmental applications, including public safety and infrastructure inspection. Inova Drone was one of the first companies in Qualcomm’s Robotics Accelerator, and was recently a part of WTC San Diego’s 2016 MetroConnect program.
• Vinny Green, Director, Business Development, Snopes (media): Leading business development for fact-checking site Snopes, Vinny and his team doubled annual site traffic to over 13 million unique visitors in October. A local, Vinny graduated from MiraCosta Community College.

• Melissa Gymrek, Assistant Professor, University of California San Diego (science): With research institutions and universities creating a major economic impact in San Diego, scientists like Melissa play a crucial role in building our San Diego’s innovation economy. Recognized for her work in genetics and with a patented algorithm for part of the genetic sequencing process, Melissa is on the forefront of San Diego’s scientific research.
• James Heller, Cofounder, Wrapify (marketing): Growing up as a car enthusiast, James used his passion to launch Wrapify, a San Diego startup that pays drivers to wrap their cars with advertisements. With $3 million in sales and 35,000 drivers, the company’s unique platform has caught on in 27 cities. James attended CSU San Marcos.
• Braydon Moreno & Coby Kabili, Cofounders, Robo 3D (manufacturing): Founded in an apartment in Pacific Beach in 2012, Robo 3D now pulls in $4.7 million in annual earnings with its high-speed consumer-based 3D printers. Part of WTC San Diego’s 2015 MetroConnect program, Robo 3D received programmatic and financial support to increase its exporting capacity in new international markets.
• Josh Watson, Esports Operation Manager, Psyonix (gaming): With the huge success of the game Rocket League, downtown San Diego-based gaming company Psyonix has been pushing its way into eSports in recent years with SDSU grad Josh Watson leading the charge. His work includes production of the Rocket League Championship Series Live International Finals, which was viewed by over 1 million people worldwide.

Now that the holidays are behind us, let’s take a look at some of the data. Early indicators point to another strong holiday shopping season in 2016, beating already lofty forecasts for retail sales¹. San Diego’s employment grew by 12,100 in November, as retailers staffed up to meet the surge of shoppers². But a lot of that hiring is seasonal, and these seasonal boosts are trending down. In fact, growth in retail trade employment has slowed dramatically over the past two years to a mere 0.1 percent.

Local employment in retail trade remains 2.8 percent below the pre-recession peak; 11 percent of regional unemployment comes from the industry³. This is because shoppers are increasingly turning to online retailers rather than brick and mortar stores – a trend that has continued to grow since the advent of e-commerce giants like Amazon.com (see chart below).

Traditional retailers are struggling to compete. Last week both Macy’s and Sears announced hundreds of store closures, which will bring thousands of layoffs across the U.S. In San Diego, Macy’s apparel store in Mission Valley will be shutting its doors, leaving 140 people without jobs⁴.

Changes in technology have had a profound impact on the economy and the composition of jobs. And while the tech boom has brought about gains in productivity, e-commerce and automation are displacing retail workers. These are jobs that are mostly held by women, and where more than half are held by people under the age of 35⁵.

EDC will keep a close eye as these trends develop. Look out for our next monthly employment report on January 20.

Sources:

1. National Retail Federation: https://nrf.com/news/retail-sales-see-solid-gains-first-half-of-holiday-season
2. San Diego December 2016 LMI Release: http://www.labormarketinfo.ca.gov/file/lfmonth/sand$pds.pdf
3. EMSI; CA LMI; BLS; Infogroup
4. Macy’s Press Release: http://www.wsj.com/articles/PR-CO-20170104-910412
5. EMSI; CA LMI; BLS; Infogroup