San Antonio—Cities across the country are offering Amazon billions of dollars in incentives to locate its second headquarters there, from Maryland’s $8.5 billion in tax breaks and credits to Atlanta’s reported offer of $1 billion and the title of mayor for Jeff Bezos for a nearby town.
As for San Antonio? City leaders didn’t even apply to land HQ2, noting in a three-page letter that “blindly giving away the farm isn’t our style.” The city is open to offering money to smaller, but quickly growing, companies looking for freebies, however.
Next week, the Bexar County Commissioners Court and the San Antonio City Council will vote on whether to offer a $250,000 grant and an up to $500,000 incentive package to The Hut Group (THG), a U.K.-based e-commerce retailer that is reportedly valued at about 2.5 billion pounds ($3.34 billion). THG plans to add about 2,000 more employees globally to the 4,000 it already has, and San Antonio leaders hope that 165 of those will be in San Antonio, according to a news release from the San Antonio Economic Development Foundation.
If the incentives are approved, the company will consider whether to locate its divisional headquarters for its e-commerce technology, THG Ingenuity, there. To get the full $500,000 incentive, THG would need to create 165 jobs that pay at least $70,000, according to the news release.
San Antonio has made similar cash offers to other businesses, such as $200,000 it wants to give to Houston-based Kiromic to move to town. Kiromic plans to make a decision in the coming weeks, CEO Scott Dahlbeck wrote in an e-mail to Xconomy. Plenty of other companies in town, from CytoBioscience to IPSecure, have received similar incentives.
