Cities vie for Honeywell project
U.S. manufacturing and technology firm Honeywell (http://www.honeywell.com) is looking at three locations in Poland as a potential new home for an engineering and design outsourcing center, company and Polish officials said last week.
Wroclaw, Krakow and Poznan are among nine cities around the world competing for the investment, which a company official said was a relatively small project for Honeywell's aerospace division (http://www.honeywell.com.pl), but which city officials would consider a significant boost to local efforts in attracting investment.
The company expects to narrow the field of candidates and decide on the next step for the pilot project in the third quarter of this year, one official familiar with the project said. The company would not put a dollar figure or timeframe on the project, though it is possible more than one location will be selected.
Wroclaw Deputy Mayor Andrzej Jaroch told the Business Journal that Honeywell has not yet made a final decision but that the firm would be an important partner for the city's technological park. If it decides to invest in Poland chances are that the company would choose Wroclaw, he added.
Krakow Technological Park (http://www.czt.cc.pl) President Krzysztof Krzysztofiak said he could not confirm Honeywell's interest.
At stake for Wroclaw are not just the prestige, investment dollars and new jobs that come with high-profile international investors: If Honeywell chooses to set up shop in the southwestern city, it would also serve to boost the Wroclaw Technological Park (WPT) (http://www.technologpark.pl), a city initiative aimed at transforming the Lower Silesian capital into a haven for high-tech research and production. However, while the project has been in the works for more than four years, it has remained largely an exercise on paper.
In 1998, Wroclaw lost out to Krakow's technology park in luring Motorola to the city. Since that time, the WPT project has been on hold in large part due to a drawn-out tug of war between the city and the treasury's Agriculture Land Agency (AWRSP) over control of the land earmarked for WPT investors.
To avoid the project being stalled for good, last year the city forked over a second plot of land for WPT to entice new investors. The move proved a wise one. After a year of talks, Finnish telecom giant Elcoteq Network Corp. purchased three hectares of land from the city for zl. 2.8 million ($666,000). The company plans to launch production next year in a E30-million greenfield facility that is expected to create 800 new jobs.
If Honeywell chooses Wroclaw, Jaroch said it will initially set up offices at the alternative WPT site alongside Elcoteq.
By the end of 2000, Krakow's park had issued business permits to 19 companies, including Motorola, that planned to invest a total zl. 700 million ($166.7 million) and create about 3,000 new jobs, officials there said.
The Honeywell project would probably not rank among the largest investments; Jaroch estimated some 30 jobs initially.
"It's not a big-scale project some people in Poland got a little overexcited," one Honeywell employee familiar with the project said. "It's a pilot project."
Honeywell employs about 125,000 people in 95 countries. Its core industries are aerospace products and services; control technologies for buildings, homes and industries; automotive products; power generation systems; specialty chemicals; fibers; plastics and other materials.
In Poland, Honeywell employs about 100 people and has offices in Warsaw, Wroclaw, Gdansk, and Chorzow, according to the company's Web site. It has been active in Poland since the 1960s and opened its first office in Warsaw in 1990.
