Gwinnett expansion adds to recent metro job gains

German shipper set to invest $5.5M in next two years, create 363 jobs.

An international shipping company will expand its Gwinnett County operations, creating more than 360 new jobs, officials announced Tuesday.

Peachtree Corners leaders broke the news regarding HapagLloyd’s consolidation and expansion prior to a news conference hosted by Gov. Nathan Deal, Gwinnett Commission Chairman Charlotte Nash and others at the state

Capitol.

The German-based company merged with United Arab Shipping Co. in 2017 and is consolidating operations at its offices on Spalding Drive in Peachtree Corners, officials said. The company plans to invest $5.5 million over the next two years and create 363 new jobs.

The company, which bills itself as the fifth-largest shipping company in the world, already employs 178 people in Peachtree Corners.

“I think it’s the greatest compliment when an existing business chooses to expand,” Nash said.

Announcements such as Tuesday’s deal in Gwinnett and last week’s announcement of the relocation of Fortune 500 company Norfolk Southern to Atlanta have been salves of sorts to business boosters who were crestfallen at the loss of Amazon’s second headquarters project known as HQ2.

Georgia aggressively courted Amazon and its promised 50,000 jobs.

Tuesday’s announcement gives Georgia’s economic development department about 5,000 new jobs announced since mid-November — when Amazon announced it had chosen to bypass cities including Atlanta and split its ballyhooed HQ2 project between New York City and the Washington, D.C., area.

That 5,000-job figure is equal to about what Amazon expects to add per year combined in New York and Northern Virginia over the next decade.

Though Amazon went elsewhere, state recruiters said Georgia finished the year in robust fashion. Deal agreed.

“I hasten to add, though, we already had about 4,000 Amazon employees in our state, even prior to that announcement,” the governor said. “And I have every reason to believe that in the not-too-distant future, perhaps the next governor will be making more announcements with regard to their presence in our state.”

The final part of that statement may or may not have been an allusion to a code-named project pitched along Gwinnett’s border with DeKalb County.

The so-called “Project Rocket” would involve 2.5 million square feet of warehouse and distribution space built on about 78 acres near Stone Mountain. The project, which would create 1,000 jobs or more, has been tied to speculation regarding a new Amazon fulfillment center.

Gwinnett County has approved the necessary special use permits for the project, but DeKalb denied a request related to an additional driveway for the facility on that side of the county line.

An attorney for the project said at the time, however, that the denial was unlikely to derail the entire project.

Gwinnett has been dealt a few blows in its own right in recent years, with businesses like technology giant NCR and paper company WestRock moving all or parts of their operations out of the suburban county and into areas closer to mass transit.

But Gwinnett is set to have a public referendum in March on joining MARTA and greatly expanding its transit services — and the mere prospect of that referendum succeeding appears to already be paying dividends.

Uffe Ostergaard, the president of Hapag-Lloyd’s North America region, said Tuesday that the potential for more transit options was “something that really helped” with the decision to expand in Peachtree Corners.

”It’s an endorsement from our side,” Ostergaard said.