Owens-Illinois Inc. is saying nothing definite about the future location of its headquarters although details have emerged on one of the possibilities which the Toledo, Ohio-based glass containers gia…
Owens-Illinois Inc. is saying nothing definite about the future location of its headquarters although details have emerged on one of the possibilities which the Toledo, Ohio-based glass containers giant is considering, if it decides to move away from its city center site. If Owens-Illinois decided to move its headquarters from Toledo to Perrysburg, Ohio, where it owns 44 hectares, it would move its North American glass-container operation into vacant space in the three buildings it has in the Levis park and would build another structure, probably about 700 square meters, to house the headquarters, said Carol Gee, company spokesperson, on 22 February 2005. The 102-year-old international corporation has about 20 hectares of undeveloped property in the 161 hectare Levis Park. Company Chairman Steven McCracken recently said that he was leading toward moving the headquarters to Perrysburg once the firm“s lease at the 32-level, One SeaGate building expires in September, 2006. He said he expected to make a decision between April and the end of June 2005. Owens-Illinois began developing the Levis park in the mid-1960s, and now has three “flexible high-tech” buildings there with a total of about 37,000 square meters. The park, named after cousins William E. Levis and J. Preston Levis, who headed the firm from the 1930s to the 1960s, has had a number of Owens-Illinois operations, particularly R&D. It now has a glass technology unit, a closures and special product unit, and a prescription product and medical devices unit along with a glass-container quality assurance operation. It has also closed some operations there such as metal-can and TV-tube production, and most recently sold a plastic-bottle operation there. The three Owens-Illinois buildings at Levis are occupied, but not completely, by about 600 employees, Ms. Gee said. If the headquarters were to move to Perrysburg, some central Toledo workers could be moved into those buildings, but another structure would be needed, she said. At points in the past 25 years, the company has had 83,000 employees worldwide, including more than 5,100 in the Toledo area. About 2,200 worked at the headquarters at one point although that number is now down to 340. The company now has about 30,000 employees across the globe and about 1,000 in the Toledo area.