Global Trade Alert

On May 11, 2015 the South Carolina Department of Commerce announced that Volvo Car Corporation had selected Berkeley County, South Carolina for a $500 million factory investment. The facility will have an initial estimated annual production capacity of around 100,000 cars for sale in the United States and for export. Construction will begin in early fall 2015, with the first vehicles expected to roll off the assembly line in 2018.
 
The state offered several incentives to encourage this decision. The Good Jobs First project calculated the total value of the package to be $212 million, broken down as follows: $123 million in economic development bonds issued by the state that will pay for the site ($54 million) and roads ($69 million); $30 million in grants from the state's Department of Commerce; a $54 million grant from the state-owned Santee Cooper utility company that will pay for land purchase; $5 million from Berkeley County to help out also with buying the land.
 
The amount does not include: $87 million in interest that the state will pay on the bonds, the value of multi-year per-job tax credits, the cost of multi-year fee-in-lieu agreement (property tax abatements) with Berkeley County, and the cost of worker recruitment and training.