Winnebago Industries, an Iowa-grown icon of the camping business, continues to expand its footprint outside the state.
This story by Kevin Hardy originally appeared in The Des Moines Register.
Though the RV maker continues production at its sweeping Forest City plant in Iowa, the executive ranks have continued to grow in the Twin Cities. When CEO Michael Happe was hired from The Toro Co. in January 2016, he chose to remain in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, opening a small executive office in Eden Prairie, Minn.
The Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal reported this week that Winnebago employs about 25 executives in Eden Prairie. The company will expand to about 100 employees there by 2018. Winnebago’s growing presence there means the company will start to appear in local listings and rankings of Minnesota-based public companies. Winnebago officials were not immediately available for comment.
Thomas Root, an associate professor of finance at Drake University, said a company's legal state of incorporation is not always in the same location as its executive base. He pointed out that Delaware has long boasted an inordinately high number of company headquarters because of favorable laws and regulations. More than 66 percent of all publicly-traded companies in the U.S. are incorporated in Delaware, according to the state’s Division of Corporations.
Even with official headquarters there, many of those companies often have limited workforces in Delaware, Root said.
Winnebago literature still lists Forest City as its headquarters.
Aside from moving the executive team to Minnesota, Winnebago has also made other out-of-state plays in recent years: In December 2015, the company purchased a shuttered motorhome plant in Oregon to move production of its biggest coaches there. And in October 2016, the company purchased Indiana-based Grand Design, the nation's fastest-growing RV maker. That towable RV business remains in Indiana.