Just a quick thought before I head out for the day... but I'm a Xerox shareholder. Now, I don't have thousands of shares, only 100, but I wonder how many people in Rochester do hold Xerox shares? Is it a majority of the company? A couple of years ago, when Xerox was really struggling, there were rumors that they might move their corporate headquarters from Stamford Connecticut back to Rochester. People in the know said, "You crazy!" And, as it turns out, they were right. Xerox has turned itself around, and all seems to be going well. Granted, they're not at $70 a share like in the good ol' days, but at $15.50, that's a heck of a lot better than a miserable $4.50!
Now, here in Rochester, we have a bit of an economic development problem... not much economic growth really happens here. Yeah, we have some great successes, particularly with Paychex, but otherwise things are kindof slow. This brings me back to the Xerox shareholder question... if the majority of Xerox shareholders were from Rochester, might we not put something up for vote by the shareholders to relocate the headquarters back here? Unless I'm wrong, that's about 500 jobs right off the bat. Couldn't we do this with a whole bunch of companies? I mean, what's stopping me from becoming a majority shareholder in all sorts of public companies and then turning around and moving them here? Seek out undervalued stocks for firms with high value and do it! Xerox is a perfect example. With annual revenues of about $18-20 billion, their stock is "only" about $15.50. How hard could it be to get a majority stake? Or, perhaps, get a team together to pull together existing stockholders to control a majority stake?
Maybe I'm crazy, but if a community could target just a couple companies, it would seem like we could add a few thousand high paying, corporate level jobs to the community without much problem. It might cost a few billion dollars, but the return on investment would be huge!
