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Potential Brexit impact UPSTATE AREA NEWS AND NOTES on the Upstate A new executive business conference is coming to Greenville TechLink aims to provide business owners and executive teams with diverse proven practices in a one-day intensive format. Five Greenville businesses and three tech giants are partnering to present this conference from 8 a.m. - 4:30 p.m. on Nov. 7 at the Embassy Suites Verdae by Hilton Golf Resort and Conference Center. Keynotes include Brent Combest, general manager, One Commercial Partner at Microsoft, plus sessions on business blind spots, productivity and cybersecurity. TechLink’s mission is to provide best practices to business leaders with companies headquartered in Greenville-metro. Techlink includes a Q&A panel, prizes, Dell demos, lunch and a cocktail hour. For tickets: www. techlinksc.com.
Linda Brees: A lifetime of service continues for kids’ sake Following her recent retirement as director of the Bradshaw Institute for Community Child Health & Advocacy at Prisma – Upstate, Linda Brees has been named a senior fellow for the Institute for Child Success. Brees has served on the board of ICS, a Greenvillebased research and policy organization, since it was founded a decade ago. The programs and initiatives that Brees has developed (e.g., Safe Kids™ Upstate, bike helmet distributions and infant safety seat inspections) have “reduced childhood deaths in our community by thirty-five percent,” said Dr. Desmond Kelly, Prisma Health pediatrician and ICS board vice-chair.
MKSK becomes an employee-owned company MKSK, Inc. the 29-year-old national award-winning, landscape architecture, urban design and planning firm, is now an employee-owned company through the creation of a new Employee Stock Ownership Plan. The plan’s objective is to provide long-term ownership and organizational stability, so talent stays intact to serve the company’s clients and secure the company’s future. MKSK has seven metropolitan studios in Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan and South Carolina. MKSK has partnered with the City of Greenville on the Reedy River Redevelopment Area and Unity Park. There are about 6,700 ESOP businesses in America, employing more than 13 million employee owners.
READ MORE ONLINE www.UPSTATEBUSINESSJOURNAL.com SUBMIT YOUR PRESS RELEASE AT: www.UpstateBusinessJournal.com/submit 20 UBJ | October 25, 2019
n story by EMILY WARNER | photo PROVIDED
The U.K. could weaken the EU and the EU could weaken other countries in turn and could potentially reach us.” -Jay Rogers, partner, Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough LLP Almost everyone has heard of Brexit, but few know exactly what it means — or understand what its consequences may be. One pressing issue is how the British government will maneuver and negotiate trade deals. Brent Nelsen, professor of politics and international affairs at Furman University, says there may be thousands of points of friction. “Every little thing has got to be negotiated, and these are very intertwined economies,” he explains. “So there’s going to be this long process of trying to figure out what their [U.K. and EU] arrangement is after Brexit.”
SIMILARITIES
Sound complicated? That’s because it is. Nelsen says Brexit is unprecedented in modern history. Duane Dingle, CEO of Greenville’s OpTek Systems, a global supplier of laser-processing tools, says what’s happening between the U.K. and EU does have some commonalities with the situation between the U.S., Mexico and Canada. One similarity is the minimal tariffs between the three North American countries, he explains. “We can ship FedEx into Canada or down to Mexico and it arrives the next day,” Dingle says. “So North America is treated as a European Union in some regard.” Imposing or changing tariffs would be comparable to Brexit, he says. “If a similar Brexit were to occur here, then we could see everything that ships into Canada have a 15% increase,” Dingle says. “That’s a problem.”
BREXIT AND THE UPSTATE
International trade is vital locally. According to the Greenville Chamber of Commerce, British companies have created more than 2,700 jobs in the Upstate since 2004. More than 107 companies from the United Kingdom are located in the state and employ nearly 11,600. Although statistics suggest Brexit will impact the Upstate economically, some people aren’t certain. Jay Rogers, a Nelson Mullins partner who provides corporate counsel to U.S.-based and international businesses, says that Brexit will likely have no ramifications here unless there’s a “Lehman effect” from the U.K.’s withdrawal. The Lehman Brothers collapse in 2008 is considered one of the first “dominos” that led to the financial crisis. “They were one of the largest investment banks in the world,” Rogers explains. He says it’s possible that Brexit could have a similar effect. “The U.K. could weaken the EU, and the EU could weaken other countries in turn and could potentially reach us,” he says. Dingle says companies doing business with or based in the U.K. should be fine as long as they don’t manufacture there, but he says it’s important to have options. “[OpTek] can manufacture here, we can manufacture in the U.K., we can manufacture in China. So we’re pretty well-positioned … We can leverage the currency,” he says, “and that’s a big, big deal.”