Philip Morris to Shutter N.C. Plant

Philip Morris USA, citing a decline in U.S. demand for cigarettes, said it will close its 2,500-employee cigarette plant in Concord, N.C., in three years.

The company said most production will move to the company’s Richmond, Va., facility, where many of the Concord plant workers would be offered jobs, Bizjournal.com reported.

It is my hope that the majority of the employees at (the) Cabarrus (plant) will be able to relocate to Richmond, says Mike Szymanczyk, Philip Morris USA chairman and chief executive.

The closure of the 2.4 million-square-foot plant is part of a bigger plan by Philip Morris, a subsidiary of Altria Group, to consolidate its plants and concentrate cigarette production in Europe.

While the local economy will feel the effects of the layoffs, the shutdown won’t have much of an effect statewide, North Carolina State University economist Mike Walden told Bizjournal.com.

One silver lining to this is that the tobacco industry has shrunk so much in North Carolina that this is not as severe a blow as it would have been 25 years ago, Walden said.