By Brice Wallace
Utah has landed a corporate headquarters, with Quotient Technology Inc. switching its base from Mountain View, California, to Salt Lake City.
The move will result in 520 new jobs in the Sugar House area over the next decade. The job creation is tied to a tax credit of more than $2.9 million that was approved during the October meeting of the Governor’s Office of Economic Development (GOED) board, which met in Cedar City during the Utah Rural Summit.
Quotient, which trades on the New York Stock Exchange, is a digital promotions, media and analytics company that delivers personalized digital coupons and ads to shoppers, based on its proprietary shopper and online engagement data. Once known as Coupons.com, it serves hundreds of consumer packaged goods and retailer companies, including Clorox, Procter & Gamble, General Mills, Unilever, Albertsons Cos., CVS, Dollar General and Ahold Delhaize USA.
Quotient also delivers digital promotions and media programs to third-party publishing properties outside of their network.
In addition to Mountain View, company has offices in Bangalore, Cincinnati, New York, Paris, London and Tel Aviv. It has about 1,000 employees, with about half of those in the U.S. In addition to serving as its new headquarters, the Utah office will be home to several corporate teams, including those in general and administrative, operations, engineering and inside sales activities.
“This is an opportunity for them to consolidate some of their California operations into Utah, specifically the Sugar House area,” Thomas Wadsworth, GOED associate managing director, told the GOED board.
“The great thing about this incentive, in addition to 520 high-paying jobs where the average wage is $119,000 and spending about $10 million in capex (capital expenditure), is it’s a corporate office coming to Utah from California, the Silicon Valley,” said Mel Lavitt, chairman of the GOED board’s incentives committee. “This was a great win for us. Staff did a terrific job, [and] the incentives committee had a lot of back and forth on it. I think we certainly came to the right numbers.”
“We are thrilled to continue our expansion, and after evaluating several possible locations, Utah was the clear winner by a wide margin,” Steven Boal, Quotient’s CEO, said in a prepared statement. “We look forward to being meaningful contributors to the local community by being recognized as a local employer of choice, and by getting involved in the bettering of the community we lease space in. Thank you to the Utah Governor’s Office of Economic Development for their assistance in making the selection of Utah a reality.”
Wadsworth said the project represents “a great opportunity” for Utah to land executive talents. “We’ve typically had back-office and customer-support type operations, but this is really exciting, to have some of the higher-level functions here in the state of Utah,” he said.
The company has been hurt by the COVID-19 pandemic and saw its revenue slip to $83.5 million during the second quarter ended June 30. It was $104.7 million during the same quarter a year earlier. In this year’s second quarter, the company’s net loss grew to $19.1 million, or 21 cents per share, when compared with a loss of $3.9 million, or 4 cents per share, in the year-earlier quarter.
Asked about the company’s net losses, Wadsworth said technology investments and doing business in California “has been running their costs up, so this [move] is an effort by the board and by others to help cut some of those costs and hopefully change some of those net losses.” He added that the company is hoping to become profitable in the next two years.
The Quotient project is expected to result in new wages of nearly $375 million over 10 years and new state tax revenue of more than $14.6 million during that time.
Utah competed with two others states for the project, including one in the Southeast. Neither state was identified but both offered incentives larger than Utah’s, Wadsworth said.
“We’re excited to welcome the digital marketing firm Quotient, to Utah” Val Hale, GOED’s executive director, said in a prepared statement. “The amount of high-paying jobs the company will bring to Utah will have a great impact on our economy, citizens and their families.”
“We’re gratified that Quotient took an in-depth look at Utah’s talent, costs of doing business, and business-friendliness, and is pursuing an expansion here,” said Theresa A. Foxley, president and CEO of the Economic Development Corporation of Utah. “We are hopeful that they represent the first of many tech projects coming off the sidelines and reengaging with Team Utah.”
