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This month, we at Commerce turn our spotlight on local packaging giant Smurfit-Stone Container Corp. and company Chairman, President and CEO Patrick Moore. Headquartered in downtown Clayton, this Fortune 500 company is the industry leader in the manufacturing of paperboard and paperboard packing.
The company also is the largest producer in North America of containerboard, corrugated containers, specialty bags and clay-coated recycled boxboard. In fact, Smurfit-Stone is the world’s largest paper recycler, collecting and processing some six million tons of paper every year.
While Smurfit-Stone might not be the most recognizable company in St. Louis, particularly for one that posted $8.3 billion in sales in 2004, the company’s products fill the kitchens, pantries, bathrooms and refrigerators of most of our households.
Smurfit-Stone has 35,000 employees and 250 plants that are located from New York to California; it operates 21 paper mills alone, and has a corrugated container facility in Chesterfield that serves 110 customers in a 200-mile radius.
Also in this issue, we take a look at the pharmaceutical companies that call St. Louis home, such as Centocor, Forrest, KV, Mallinckrodt, Pfizer, Tripos and TUMS, to name a few.
Pfizer alone, for example, is a major employer in the State of Missouri. Of the some 1,200 employees at its four campuses in the St. Louis region, 1,000 are scientists, and growing that intellectual power here bodes well for the metropolitan area.
In addition, Commerce writer Linda Jarrett has penned a very interesting piece about the resurgence of business travel. 9/11 had an immediate and continuing adverse effect on travel, both national and international. Security concerns and a dwindling economy caused many companies to stay within U.S. borders for their business and incentive travel needs.
However, with a more self-sustaining
economy and consumer confidence returning, people are taking to the air in numbers approaching pre-9/11 levels. Business and incentive trips are branching outside the continental U.S. with its Caribbean and southern hemisphere neighbors, and returning to popular destinations abroad such as England, France, Germany and Italy.
Finally, in this issue of Commerce, read about McCormack Baron Salazar Chairman and CEO Richard Baron, who has long been recognized as one of the nation’s most successful developers of inner city, mixed-income communities with 11,500 housing units in 102 developments in 28 cities.
Richard was recently honored as 2004 Laureate of the Urban Land Institute (ULI) J.C. Nichols Prize, the real estate industry’s equivalency of the Oscar. The prestigious Nichols Prize recognizes a person whose career demonstrates a commitment to the highest standards of responsible development.
ULI could not have selected a more accomplished and worthy person to receive this prestigious award than St. Louis’ own Richard Baron.
RICHARD C.D. FLEMING
President and Chief Executive Officer
St. Louis Regional Chamber and Growth Association |
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