You will hear five senior managers talking about why their companies selected new locations, and about a difficulty that affecte

Speaker One
Man: We’re a small firm that manufactures machine parts, and we wanted to expand. There was no space on our old site, so we realised we’d have to move to a different town. We had well-qualified staff who would have no difficulty getting other jobs without having to move home, and we needed to keep nearly all of them. So that meant looking for premises in towns that were within easy reach for most of the workforce. We found somewhere suitable, but within a very short time, several major employers moved to the area, and, as a result, rents rocketed. This was before we’d signed the lease, and suddenly the place we wanted was almost beyond our means. In the end, we managed to get it, but it was a struggle.
Speaker Two
Woman: The company I work for does contract work for the government, and we moved here from London. In fact, the original designs were for a much bigger building, but that caused a major furore, with a local newspaper running a campaign against it, so it had to be scaled down. London was great, but the high overheads and the difficulties of travelling meant we had to move - almost anywhere. It was important to retain as many of the staff as possible, so the bosses did a survey to find out what would make people agree to relocate. The majority were fairly mobile, as their children had grown up, and what emerged as their priority was that house prices should be within their reach. This place is ideal in that respect.
Speaker Three
Man: The original plan was to construct a new manufacturing plant here. Because we use ’just in time’ methods, we didn’t want to have components and raw materials coming great distances, so we picked this town because we could get most of these from local sources. But soon after we started building, we realised we didn’t require additional manufacturing capacity after all, and decided to use the site for a big distribution centre, serving the whole of Europe, and to close several smaller centres. So construction of the plant was halted, new plans were drawn up, and we went through the whole procedure of getting planning permission again. But it all went very smoothly, and we were still able to open on the original date.
Speaker Four
Woman: I work for a foreign company which moved a factory here from another country fairly recently. The size of the available site was important, but it was the package of state aid which determined where the factory ended up. There was a lot of competition to construct it, and in the end, the contract went to a consortium, but they had all sorts of problems, financial ones mostly, and there was a lot of bickering between the companies involved. The upshot of it all was that the move was terribly overdue. Luckily, there was a penalty clause in the contract, so we didn’t lose as much money as we would have done otherwise, but a lot of the people we’d offered jobs to went elsewhere.
Speaker Five
Man: In my sector, there are lots of small companies, with frequent mergers and acquisitions, and high staff turnover. Of course, that can be a disadvantage, but on the other hand, ideas for new products tend to grow, not just from internal research and development, but through the informal contacts that staff have with people at other firms. We really couldn’t create those links where we were, because we were geographically isolated, so to get close to a cluster of similar companies meant we had to move. Rents were so high that the boss decided to invest in having something built. Initially, he hired a small building firm, which went under just after they’d started the work. Apparently they’d overstretched themselves by taking on too many jobs, had serious cashflow problems, and couldn’t pay their creditors, but he found another firm straightaway, who managed to meet the original deadline.
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Now listen to the recording again.
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That is the end of Part Two.