Flat-Screen Plasma TV Maker is Moving to Lumberton, N.C.
By Karin Rives, The News & Observer, Raleigh, N.C.
Mar. 10–Bozco TV, a fledgling California company hoping to break into the Asian-dominated market for flat-screen plasma televisions, is relocating to Lumberton.
The state is chipping in a $250,000 incentives grant from the One North Carolina Fund. Bozco is also getting $185,419 in local aid in return for creating at least 104 jobs over the next three years in the economically battered community.
The company plans to invest $1.1 million in the former packing plant that it will be occupying along Interstate 95, about 35 miles south of Fayetteville.
Bozidar Racich, Bozco’s president and owner, said he and his three business partners had produced a limited number of monitors and screens for about a year in Fremont, Calif., when nearing the end of their lease.
“California has a lot of red tape, and all those mudslides. So I Š [went] around to shop and found this place, Lumberton, N.C.,” Racich said in a telephone interview. “People are very friendly here, and 70 percent of our business is in the East.”
Tipping the scale in favor of Lumberton was also its proximity to the port in Wilmington, Racich said Thursday afternoon, shortly before meeting with Robeson County and Lumberton officials.
North Carolina won out against Louisiana, Alabama and Canada, he said. For Lumberton, which has suffered from years of manufacturing layoffs and high unemployment rates, Bozco’s investment is particularly welcome.
Also known as Idisplay.tv Corp., the company was started by three engineers from South Korea who lacked the capital and marketing experience to successfully commercialize their products. Racich, an immigrant from the former Yugoslavia who built a furniture outlet chain in the Midwest, came to their rescue in 2004.
He said he has invested about $1 million in state-of-the-art assembly-line equipment, making himself a 100 percent owner of the company.
State, county and city officials say they did their homework on Bozco before issuing the grants. The One North Carolina Fund program has some safeguards built in: Companies only receive their quarterly payments after meeting the job creation goals spelled out under the contract.
Racich said he plans to hire 23 people the first year, increasing to more than 100 after three years. Average annual wages will be $35,724 — less than he paid his 20-some employees in California, but more than Robeson’s average annual wage of $22,776.
Attending the furniture market in High Point in the last few years, Racich says he’s networked with dealers who are eager to get good deals on flat-screen plasma televisions straight from a producer.
“My first idea was to help the furniture people,” he said of his interest in flat-screen televisions. “I can get better prices for them.”
Bozco is the first American maker of plasma televisions in a market dominated by imports from Korea, Japan, China and Taiwan. Racich is also working with Robeson County Community College to open a first-of-its-kind technical training program for technicians to repair flat-panel televisions.
Bozco’s headquarters will move to Lumberton, and production is expected to begin in May. All manufacturing machinery has been boxed up in trailers, with the first truck expected to leave California for North Carolina this morning.
Racich plans to split his time between homes in North Carolina, Arizona, California and Illinois.
Gregory Cummings, Robeson County’s economic development director, said Lumberton won the competition for the new factory because it had an empty 95,000-square-foot building available, because the community college was willing to work with Bozco, and because nobody objected to the company’s plan to put a large replica of a plasma television in front of the building.
“We just got lucky,” he said.
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