Economist cites Hickory area as key industrial signal
- Business North Carolina
- 7 days ago
- 2 min read
Charlotte economist Mark Vitner, a keen observer of the Carolinas business community for decades, recently called Hickory and Catawba County “one of the most important industrial stories in the Southeast right now.”
In a July 15 report for his Southeast Economic Advisors firm, he notes how the county reflects the “two-speed economy” in which traditional goods production is cutting jobs, while “construction crews and advanced-materials investments are remaking the economic map.”
What’s most remarkable, he reports, is that improving prospects in the Hickory region follows a multi-decade slide dating to the mid-1990s. The county’s unemployment rate was about 1.8% in 1999 and the region’s textiles, furniture and optical-cable companies couldn’t find enough workers.
But the North American Free Trade Agreement, enacted in 1994, shifted traditional manufacturing to lower-cost nations from the Catawba Valley. It was initially masked by the growing cable business, but the 2001 dot-com debacle hit communications networking very hard, hurting the region.
Over the next decade after NAFTA took effect, furniture employment fell by 50%, and has continued to decline. Textile firms that employed about 12,000 now have fewer than 1,500 workers. Unemployment reached nearly 15% in 2010, among the highest rates in the U.S. Many homes in Hickory could be acquired for less than $100,000, Vitner recalls.
Fortunately, Catawba County’s fiber manufacturing sector led by Corning and CommScope rebounded and now is powering the region. The companies’ prospects are soaring because data centers require so much fiber, sparking much-publicized plans by Corning to expand aggressively in the region.
It has announced major contracts with Big Tech giants Amazon, Nvidia and Meta. The latter company’s business will make Corning’s Hickory plant the largest in global optical cable manufacturing when it comes online next year, Vitner notes.
Microsoft has committed at least $1 billion for four data center campuses in Conover, Hickory, Maiden and Newton. The plans stalled, but construction is now underway and promises to have a major impact, says Vitner, who spent much of his career with Wells Fargo and its predecessor Charlotte banks.
He also credits Hickory and state leadership for effective “soft infrastructure” investments to make the region more attractive for residents and newcomers. The Catawba Valley Community College, Appalachian State University and Lenoir-Rhyne University campuses make higher education a regional strength, ”The training pipeline is doing real work, not simply granting degrees,” he says.
Vitner says the region isn’t “riding a consumer boom or a speculative bubble. It is attracting durable, capital-intensive investment into the high-value end of the economy.”
The area has enjoyed “some real leadership,” he says. “It’s encouraging to see Hickory has rolled with the punches, reinvented itself and used assets left behind to prepare for the next thing. It’s great to watch.”