As demand for fiber explodes, Corning builds on an enduring legacy in North Carolina.

Challenge: Corning Inc. seeks to increase fiber production as demand for bandwidth outpaces providers.

Solution: Building on previous expansions, Corning’s optical-communications business, representing about $3 billion of its $10 billion annual revenue, chose North Carolina to accommodate the growth.

By Edward Martin

Denise Adams grew up here, working summer breaks from Baltimore’s Morgan State University at R.J. Reynolds Co., the cigarette maker that had shaped her hometown for a century. Her father worked at the factory too, but Adams was of her family’s new generation. By the time she graduated in 1976, Winston-Salem was changing around her. Reynolds was paring employees by the thousands, though it would survive. Dozens of other industries and businesses would not.

With a college degree and manufacturing experience, Adams landed one of 500 jobs at Stroh Brewery Co.’s local plant. People, she reasoned, would always drink beer, so her future was secure. She was partly right.

“I was there for 18½ years, in quality control, management and supervisory positions,” she says. “Then I was downsized.” Competitor Adolph Coors Co. bought Stroh, then, to satisfy antitrust regulators, began phasing it out. But in 1994, word began circulating through Winston-Salem about a new industry.

It was Siecor, a joint venture between Siemens AG and Corning Inc. (Corning would later buy Siemens’ share.) “They interviewed at the convention center, and thousands showed up,” Adams says. She was hired, and was soon testing cables of optical fiber, each hair-sized strand capable of simultaneously carrying thousands of telephone calls.

Now retired and a member of the Winston-Salem City Council, Adams and colleagues last fall approved $435,000 in incentives for an expansion that will push Winston’s Corning fiber-cabling plant to more than 400 workers. As a one-time employee, Adams has had a firsthand view of Corning’s impact on North Carolina from two perspectives.

“When they came to town, it was like another R.J. Reynolds,” she says. “They brought lots of promise, lots of hope, lots of opportunity. And it was something a lot different than textiles and tobacco.”

Decades after the Corning, N.Y.-based communications icon arrived in North Carolina, such scenarios are still unfolding. The Winston-Salem announcement in September 2016 was paired with a similar expansion of its Hickory cabling plant, the two totaling 205 jobs and an investment of $83.5 million.

They came as part of a flurry of Corning Optical Communications LLC moves in the state, including relocating company headquarters from Hickory to a new $38.7 million building in Charlotte and adding about 150 jobs to its roughly 500-person headquarters staff.

“You’ve got a marquee brand that speaks for itself,” says Tony Copeland, who knows optical fiber from the ground up. Now N.C. Secretary of Commerce, he was executive vice president of BTI Telecom Corp. from 1992 until 2003, when the Raleigh-based company was laying more than 5,000 miles of fiber along the East Coast. “Establishing your headquarters tells about the desirability of a state because of the stability and predictability of doing business here.”

A few months after the Winston-Salem commitment, Corning announced it would spend $176 million to build an additional optical fiber plant in Newton, near Hickory, and expand its Midland plant in Cabarrus County, creating a combined 410 jobs over the next two years.

Altogether, the expansions will push Corning employment in North Carolina to more than 3,700 at seven sites, says Joe Dunning, a New York-based company spokesman. “They include two of the world’s largest fiber manufacturing facilities in Concord and Wilmington,” he says, “and two of the world’s largest fiber-cabling facilities in Winston-Salem and Hickory.”

The rush of developments caps the long run of a pioneer of Tar Heel technology, in many ways, one that parallels the state’s transition from legacy industries such as cotton and furniture that flourished after the Civil War.

The challenge of wooing and keeping Corning has become a primer in industrial recruiting, government and private-sector relationships and the commitment of a company to weather global vicissitudes. Clark Kinlin, executive vice president of Corning Optical, praises the ongoing support of local and state governments that have made Corning’s Tar Heel investments pay off.

“What’s most interesting about Corning is the ability it’s shown to transform itself as the economy and products have changed,” says Michael Walden, an economist at N.C. State University. “Not all firms have successfully done that. Kodak is a good example.” Analysts say the Rochester, N.Y.-based film giant’s failure to react effectively to digital photography was devastating. “Corning has rolled with the punches and remade itself several times.”

Corning’s North Carolina history began in Wilmington, where a complex of massive, gray buildings laced with pipes and ducts sprawls along North College Road, sandwiched a few miles between the Cape Fear River to the west and the Atlantic to the east.

In the 1950s, the Port City struggled to pump life into its economy. In 1956, it formed a committee to recruit industry. Ten years later, it notched one of its enduring successes — Corning, a newcomer, would make transistors and electrical components.

“I was a year old at the time,” laughs Scott Satterfield, CEO of Wilmington Business Development. “But if you look back at the long-term legacy of Corning in our area, it began to set the stage for major technology industries in the state and especially in Greater Wilmington.” Dunning says the company perfected low-loss optical fiber in 1970 and installed its optical-fiber manufacturing equipment in Wilmington in 1978, creating one of the world’s first optical-fiber plants. It moved transistor manufacturing to Pennsylvania.

“Throughout the years,” Satterfield adds, “Corning has attracted the best and brightest and incorporated a dynamic manufacturing environment as well as a dynamic research and development environment.”

As the state gradually shed its mules and smokestacks, Corning grew simultaneously, though sometimes less noticed, with other icons of Tar Heel technology such as General Electric and CommScope.

“We’d been known throughout the world for furniture and, by many, as the center of the hosiery industry,” says Scott Millar, who has headed Catawba County’s economic recruiting since 1994. In 2000, Corning bought Siecor, merged it with its cable division, and created Hickory-based Corning Optical Communications. “By 1999, we had a three-legged stool, and the third leg was technology, coaxial and communications cabling and fiber optics.”

With about 40% of the world’s optical fiber produced there, Catawba County adopted a new sobriquet, “Telecom Valley,” Millar says. “Corning was a huge player in that.” By some measures, such as fiber-optic employment, North Carolina is now the nation’s largest producer of optical fiber and cabling.
In a volatile industry, though, Corning in North Carolina was no more immune to global fluctuations than legacy-industry predecessors such as apparel and textiles. A specular fire in 2010 sent towers of black smoke soaring over Wilmington, damaging its plant, but remarkably, Corning kept production going without disrupting customer orders. Other factors were more persistent.

“In about 2001, when the dot.com bubble burst, there were a lot of bit players forced out of the communications world,” Millar says. In Catawba, the industry shed about 1,800 jobs in that one year, and in Cabarrus, two counties to the southeast, the impact was painfully visible. Corning’s showplace Midland plant, the same one that earlier this year announced a $109 million expansion with new jobs paying 50% higher than the county average — was forced to temporarily close, laying off 800.

Adams, the one-time Winston-Salem Corning employee, would pass it when driving to visit South Carolina relatives. “It was dark a long time,” she says. “The parking lot was full of weeds and grass. The economy went belly up, and it just sat there, looking like who-shot-John.”

The company takes a long-term view to market vagaries, Dunning says, always looking to the future by plowing as much of 10% of annual sales into research and development. One of its research-oriented labs, Hickory Manufacturing Technology Center is in Catawba. Gradually, Corning and the optical-fiber industry began to spring back in North Carolina.

Now, that rebound is being fueled by worldwide hunger for digital data, video and similar uses. Corning puts North Carolina’s role in meeting that demand in perspective: More than 20 billion devices such as smartphones are creating two zettabytes — that’s about the same as 500 billion DVDs — of internet traffic annually. The bulk is video, which gobbles enormous capacity.

“Fast forward to today’s increased bandwidth and data transmission, and there’s a huge need for more and more fiber,” Copeland says. Corning in April signed a $1 billion agreement with Verizon Communications Inc., the New York-based telecom giant, to provide, among other things, up to 12.4 million miles of optical fiber each year through 2020.

High stakes have made Corning a plum pursued by the nation’s and world’s technology recruiters, and North Carolina has had to scramble to remain in the running. The company is attracted by the state’s highly skilled workforce, Kinlin says, many of whom train in North Carolina’s 58-school community college system in addition to Corning’s vaunted internal training programs. “We typically reinvest in places where we are winning, and this is a winning environment,” Kinlin said at a September manufacturing conference in Winston-Salem.

Dunning praises the state’s educational system. “To remain competitive, North Carolina needs to emphasize STEM — science, technology, engineering and math — education,” he says. He singles out N.C. State University, UNC Wilmington and UNC Charlotte as being “critical to helping inspire our future workforce,” but adds that Corning hires from within its local areas. “The North Carolina community-college system in particular has been and continues to be a strong partner to Corning for job training and retraining.”

But economic pragmatism is a factor, too. Incentive programs must be competitive.

Under the state’s Job Development Investment Grant program, expanding and new companies get back part of the tax-base increase they create. Corning will receive about $2.6 million in Cabarrus and $2.1 million in Catawba over 12 years if it follows through on job-creation commitments.

Corning and other companies receiving grants have to show they’ll boost the state treasury over the period of the grant. Part of the money goes into a fund to help North Carolina recruit and develop more industry, and the expansions in Catawba and Cabarrus could generate about $1 million for that program. The state’s payback from Corning, however, is more than money. Its jobs are usually carried out in clean rooms at wages that are typically a third higher than locally prevailing ones. “There’s no sawdust or lint involved,” Millar says. “Communications products are generally produced in air-conditioned and controlled environments. There’s lots of engineering involved, and lots of patent creation and spinoff industries.”

Like the pulses of light that carry optical signals, Corning’s impact on the Tar Heel technology sector might be its greatest contribution to the state, as a role model to help court other companies.

“I cannot adequately put into words how important it is to highlight that type of employer when we’re talking about our region,” says Satterfield, the Wilmington economic developer. When we have clients come here and you can have them physically see the facility as well as interact with key folks involved there, it speaks volumes for what the greater Wilmington area is capable of providing a technology-driven company.”

Catawba’s Millar agrees. One of the state’s most successful industry recruiters, he has glimpsed the inner workings of corporate decision-making. “I’ve often said, the easiest way to sell a site is to put a bulldozer on it or next to,” he says. “The confidence of a company like Corning to make a big investment furthers the confidence of someone else. If you’re a CEO, it makes you more willing to stand up in front of your board of directors and make a recommendation, if you can point to somebody else that has already decided to spend $100 million in the same area.”

Another layer of Corning’s history in North Carolina is difficult to quantify, though community leaders say it’s just as valid. The company typically integrates itself into host communities, with executives and employees taking part in local arts, civic and other organizations. Its new headquarters in Charlotte is an example.

Corning officials say the decision to move it from Hickory was difficult, but it had outgrown its longstanding headquarters there and renovations were deemed too expensive. But almost simultaneously, Corning announced it would spend $67 million to refit a vacant industrial building and add 210 manufacturing jobs in Catawba County. The new jobs will pay about $57,000 annually.

“Over the past decade, we’ve invested substantial resources in the Catawba County United Way, area arts and STEM educational programs and community boards and foundations,” Dunning says. “We’ll continue providing significant support.”

In Winston-Salem, Denise Adams remained in manufacturing for her working lifetime before retiring in 2013 from Johnson Controls Inc.’s battery division.

“I know what has happened to manufacturing technology over the decades,” she says. “I’ve been part of it. I’ve seen. I was trained coming out of tobacco and brewing to the technology of Siemens-Corning — Siecor. I was just fortunate to spend part of my manufacturing career there.”