Tag Archives: Head office relocation

Smelltech company moves headquarters to Houston

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Ainos, a Nasdaq-traded company with a market capitalization of $10 million, has relocated its corporate office from San Diego to the Galleria area of Houston.

The company is a dual platform AI and biotech company pioneering smelltech and immune therapeutics. The company was originally formed as Amarillo Biosciences in 1984. In 2021, it changed its name to Ainos, following a takeover by Taiwan Carbon Nano Technology Corporation. Most of its employees are based in Taiwan.

The core technology is an AI-based electronic sensory system for smells that integrates gas sensor arrays with proprietary artificial intelligence models to digitize scents into machine-readable data format. The company believes that there are many industrial applications where real-time sensing and anomaly detection is important.

In the first quarter, Ainos received an initial order for 1,400 AI Nose systems worth $2.1 million from a semiconductor manufacturer.  The initial order is to be delivered over three years. If successful, 20,000 AI Noses in total, could be eventually be deployed with that customer.

Separately, the company is continuing to develop a low-dose oral interferon platform targeting selected rare, autoimmune and infectious disease indications.

In 2025, the company had revenues of $124,000 and a net loss of $15 million.

Chairman and CEO Chun-Hsien (‘Eddy’) Tsai is based in Taiwan. So is CFO Hsin-Liang (‘Christopher’) Lee, who is licensed as a CPA in the United States.

You can see the complete list of Houston-area public companies here.

Ainos shareholder letter on Phased AI Nose deployment

Chevron to move its head office to Houston

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Chevron has decided to move its head office from California to Houston. In doing so, it will become the second largest company, by market capitalization, behind ExxonMobil, who moved from Irving last year.



Chevron has a market cap of $274 billion, compared to Exxon’s $524 billion, but ahead of ConocoPhillips ($123 billion).

The move has been rumored for many years. Chevron stated that California has a number of policies that ‘raise costs, hurt consumers and discourage investment’. Chevron first located its head office in the San Francisco Bay area in 1879 when it was known as Pacific Coast Oil. It sold its 92-acre headquarters in 2022.

The company currently has 2,000 employees in its San Ramon offices and plans to move corporate functions to Houston over the next five years. CEO Mike Wirth will move before the end of the year.

Chevron has currently 7,000 employees in the Houston area. It occupies two towers in downtown Houston – 1500 Louisiana St and 1400 Smith St (which was formerly the Enron HQ). Both towers were damaged in the May derecho that hit Houston.

In 2023, Chevron acquired a 77-acre plot in Cypress, which is part of the Bridgeland development. Officially, that is being developed as a R&D campus, but don’t be surprised if that becomes the location of the corporate office. It’s in NW Houston, about 25 miles from the 385-acre ExxonMobil complex in Spring.

https://www.chevron.com/newsroom/2024/q3/chevron-announces-headquarters-relocation-and-senior-leadership-changes

 

ExxonMobil officially moves its head office to Spring, TX

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Gary Coronado/Houston Chronicle

ExxonMobil has officially changed the location of its headquarters from Irving to Spring with an 8-K filing with the SEC on July 5. Exxon has a market capitalization of $417 billion and therefore becomes the largest company in the Houston-area, as measured by market cap. Its market cap is over three times the next largest (ConocoPhillips at $125 billion).



The company announced back in January 2022 that it would be relocating its corporate offices to its campus in Spring sometime in 2023.

Exxon moved its head office from Manhattan to Irving in 1989. The campus in Irving, built in 1996, was 365,000 square feet and housed 250 employees, who were offered relocation packages. In December 2022, the company sold the offices and 290 acres of land (of which 200 were undeveloped) to an Austin-based developer, Capital Commercial Investments.

Jones Lang LaSalle, who brokered the sale, have been hired to market the office building to companies looking to relocate to the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The development plans of Capital Commercial for the rest of the property are not yet known.

Construction on the campus in Spring began in 2011 when oil was over $100 a barrel. It was completed in 2015, when oil was below $60. It is based on 385 acres and officially houses 10,000 employees. The campus is currently appraised at $990 million.

As a side note, when a company changes its corporate office, it doesn’t have to file a document with the SEC. It just starts using the new address with its next filing. The Exxon filing happened to be a Regulation FD disclosure on upcoming earnings considerations.

Vroom relocates head office from Manhattan to Houston

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Vroom, the online car retailer has moved its head office from Manhattan to the Westchase area of Houston as it attempts to cut costs to maintain its long-term viability.

The company had been burning through cash as it chased triple digit annual revenue growth. It is currently losing about $7,000 on every car sold. The company now has a new CEO and CFO that are working on a plan to realign the business.



The company went public via a $468 million IPO in June 2020 that priced its shares at $22 and gave the company a market cap of $2.8 billion. The shares peaked at $74 a few months later. They now trade at $1.35.

In 2021, the company had revenues of $3.2 billion and had an adjusted EBITDA loss of $340 million. It sold 75,000 vehicles through the Vroom platform.

The Houston angle is the result of the company buying Texas Direct Auto (TDA) in Stafford in 2015. TDA remains its only physical dealership. At the time, TDA was the largest independent dealership in the USA and a pioneer on selling cars online. TDA sold 7,212 used cars in 2021 and had revenues of $230 million.

The new CEO is Tom Shortt. He became CEO in May, though he joined the company in January as COO. Prior to joining Vroom, he was a Senior VP at Walmart, where he developed an ecommerce supply chain strategy. Before that, he worked at Home Depot, Acco Brands and Fisher Scientific.

CFO Bob Krakowiak joined the company in September 2021 and is based out of Detroit. Previously he worked at Stoneridge Corporation and Visteon, both automotive electronics suppliers.

Key aspects of the realignment plan are;

  • Increasing gross profit per unit by better data analytics. The company acquired CarStory, an analytics company, for $117 million in January 2021
  • Building a captive finance offering. It acquired UACC, an auto finance company, for $316 million in February 2022
  • Better logistics. No more shipping cars from Oregon to Florida for a flat fee!
  • A more efficient title and registration process. Vroom and Carvana have very high consumer complaints in this area.

The company has recently reduced its headcount by 270 or 14%.

The good news is that the company is expected to have about $500 million of liquidity by the end of 2022 and there is only $625 million of long-term debt which is due in 2026 (other than the securitized debt associated with UACC).

The bad news is that selling vehicles is a very competitive business and $7,000 is lot to make up!

Vroom – Investor Relations presentation

HPE to relocate head office to Houston area

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Photo: Patrinely Group and CDC Houston

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has announced it is moving its head office from San Jose to the Houston-area, though it is not clear how many jobs will relocate. HPE has revenues of $27 billion and a market capitalization of $14.4 billion. It provides servers and networking solutions aimed at large enterprises.



HPE was spun off from HP in 2015, with HP concentrating on consumer products. The largest concentration of HPE employees in the US was already in Houston. That was a result of its 2002 takeover of Compaq, founded in 1982 in Houston.

HPE’s current CEO Antonio Neri was based out of Houston for 11 years, prior to his relocation to California in 2015.

HPE will be moving into a newly-built campus in Springwoods Village, due to be completed in 2022. The HPE campus will consist of two five-story buildings totaling 440,000 sq. feet.  Construction started pre-pandemic so it’s not clear how much of space they will really need. Springwoods Village is also home to ExxonMobil’s 3 million sq. ft campus and HP’s 378,000 sq. ft campus.

Both HPE and HP previously occupied the former Compaq campus in NW Houston but decided to move after that campus was badly flooded in both 2016 and 2017 (Hurricane Harvey).

SEC filing – HPE relocation

Restaurant chain moves corporate office to Houston area

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[UPDATE – Dec 2022 Head office is now back in Fort Worth. CEO is still Mike Roper]

Muscle Maker has moved its corporate office from the Dallas-Fort Worth area to League City. The company has a market capitalization of $18 million and went public in February 2020. It was founded in New Jersey in 1995 and had its head office in the League City area until 2018.



The company owns and operates Muscle Maker Grill and Healthy Joe restaurants. Muscle Maker concentrates on fresh, made-to-order protein-based meals while Healthy Joe’s has a wider menu selection. As of 30 June, it operated 31 restaurants, located in 15 states and Kuwait. 20 of them are franchise restaurants.

Because of the pandemic, the company is moving to a delivery-only ‘ghost kitchen’  concept. The company intends to expand into non-traditional locations such as universities, military bases and office buildings.

The CEO is Mike Roper. He became the CEO in May 2018. Before that, he was the CEO of Taco Bueno, a Tex-Mex restaurant chain with its head office in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Ferdinand Groenewald serves as the CFO. He joined the company in October 2017 and became the CFO in September 2019.

I’ve added Muscle Maker to the list of Houston Public Companies, along with Murphy Oil, an E&P company with a market cap of $1.3 billion. The company formally moved its head office from Arkansas to west Houston earlier this summer.

SEC filing – Muscle Maker