Property Types Industrial
Indian Firm Buys Land for $100M HQ in Little Rock
Aug 18, 2008
By: Tonie Auer, Southwest Correspondent

Man Industries, a pipe-manufacturing firm based in Mumbai, India, has made its first venture into the United States with the purchase of 155 acres of land in Little Rock, Ark., with plans to build a $100 million facility to serve as its North and South American headquarters. Construction will begin later this month in an existing industrial area on Greenfields. No targeted completion date was released.

“The cost of transporting finished goods from India had risen to a level that it was too expensive and made better sense to have a location in the U.S. to be closer to their market because much of their finished goods were being sold here,” Glynn Mireles (pictured), first vice president with CB Richard Ellis Inc. in Houston, told CPN.

Mireles said CBRE searched for an ideal location for Man Industries looking up and down the Gulf Coast and along the Mississippi River. “Man Industries manufactures 80-foot long joints of pipe, which really can’t be transported over the road the well, making it necessary to find a location with port and rail access,” Mireles said.

The firm’s customer base is the oil and gas industry and municipalities.

“Little Rock is just off the Mississippi and Arkansas Rivers,” Mireles said. “You don’t think of it, but Little Rock is a port city. It is central to 70 percent of the U.S. population by rail and the Mississippi River allows them to go north and south, so it was a logistics decision.”

Mireles and Jeff Everist with CBRE-Houston, negotiated the sale on behalf of the buyer.

Man Industries (India) Ltd. is an ISO-9001 accredited company. It is a member of The Man Group (UK) and is a manufacturer and exporter of large diameter carbon steel line pipes for various high pressure transmission applications for gas, crude oil, petrochemical products and potable water.

 
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