Plans for $290M North Las Vegas manufacturing facility abandoned
Plans for a $290 million aluminium beverage can manufacturing facility in North Las Vegas have been nixed.
Ball Corp., NYSE: BALL, announced in 2021 that it was planning to invest $290 million in the project to be built at Apex Industrial Park and create 180 jobs. The company said it had “permanently discontinued” plans for its facility in its third-quarter earnings report in November.
A Ball Corp. spokesperson declined to comment further on its North Las Vegas decision.
Ball Corp. — a Colorado-based packaging and aerospace company — was abandoning its plans for North Las Vegas to “maximize returns on invested capital and position our North American plant system for near-term demand trends,” the report stated. The company also announced that it was stopping operations at a facility in Kent, Washington, and delaying opening another facility in Concord, North Carolina, until 2028.
“The combination of these actions will ensure supply/demand balance is appropriate for current macroeconomic conditions while also providing our customers access at scale to high-quality, innovative aluminum cans and bottles from our agile plant network and, also enable our ability to achieve appropriate returns on capital for the value delivered,” Ball Corp.’s report stated.
The company reported third-quarter sales of $3.57 billion, roughly a 9.6 percent decrease from the same quarter in 2022.
The 2023 closure announcement wasn’t the first sign of trouble for the proposed North Las Vegas facility as Ball Corp. said in its second-quarter 2022 earnings report that the project was delayed because of a “deceleration” in demand.
Ball Corp. was approved for $17.5 million in tax abatements from the Governor’s Office of Economic Development around the time the North Las Vegas facility was first announced in 2021. But the company never entered into an official contract to get those tax abatements, a GOED spokesperson said.
Companies that have tax abatement contracts are audited by the Nevada Department of Taxation to ensure they are complying with any abatement requirements. If a company isn’t meeting the abatement requirements, it’s required to pay back any abated taxes in full, according to GOED.
But since Ball Corp. never entered into a tax abatement contract, it didn’t have any tax abatements to pay back.
Contact Sean Hemmersmeier at shemmersmeier@reviewjournal.com. Follow @seanhemmers34 on X.