More than a decade after Graham County suffered an economic body blow with the closing of its biggest manufacturer, a Chinese company is stepping up with a planned $80.5 million to create 515 jobs in Robbinsville.
Foreign companies have announced investments of $43.5 billion and the promise of almost 65,000 jobs in the Tar Heel state over the previous 10 years. But mountainous Graham County, the third-least populous N.C. county, missed out.
“It’s an extremely rural county that doesn’t get a whole lot of looks,” says Solange Tricanowicz, a recruitment manager for the Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina. That’s part of what made EcoKing Solutions’ jobs announcement in July such a major win for the far western edge of the state.
EcoKing Solutions says it will start manufacturing biodegradable paper products by next year for customers, including Chipotle and Panda Express. Plans call for 300 employees by 2027. Another 215 workers are expected after Duke Energy increases the site’s electrical capacity from 8 megawatts to 24 megawatts.
If EcoKing follows through on its promises, it will be the largest private employer in Graham County, which has about 8,050 residents and a labor force of 3,646.
Potential new industry offers hope for an area that lost 400 jobs when Stanley Furniture closed in 2014 after offering employment to generations of workers for three decades. While North Carolina‘s population grew at the eighth-fastest rate in the U.S. over the past decade, Graham County declined by about 800 residents. Robbinsville, the county seat about 90 miles west of Asheville, has a population of about 563 residents, about 190 fewer than in 2010.
“People had to move away to find jobs,” says Lynn Cody, a Graham County commissioner for 20-plus years. “We’re hoping this will bring some people back.” He calls EcoKing’s decision a “true blessing.”
EcoKing’s parent company started in 2008 in China, where it employs about 1,200 workers. The company started looking for a U.S. site more than a year ago because 80% of its products are sold to American fast-food restaurants and grocery stores, says John Lin, the vice president and project lead.
“Our clients like to use a product made in the U.S.A.,” says Lin, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Taiwan. He’s moving his family from Atlanta to Robbinsville.
While EcoKing started looking at expanding before the recent friction in U.S.-China trade relations, Lin says President Donald Trump’s threats of higher tariffs on the Asian nation helped push it forward. “Tariffs do affect us a lot,” he says.
The company will use the region’s forests to turn timber into wood pulp to make its products, helping avoid trade duties, says Lin. “We can say we’re made in the U.S.A. and then sell our products to the world.”
The U.S. had a $101 billion trade deficit with China during the first five months of this year, with $148.5 billion in imports and $48.6 billion in exports, government data shows. The deficit totaled more than $1.3 billion over the past four years.
EcoKing’s new jobs are expected to pay an annual salary averaging $46,707 a year, about $1,100 more a year than the current Graham County pay. Those wages are “incomparable” to the low wages earned by EcoKing workers in China, says Lin, but the company will benefit from lower shipping costs.
Before EcoKing’s announcement, Chinese companies had created
more than 3,400 jobs and made more than $897 million
in capital investments in North Carolina since 2014.
Chinese companies with a large North Carolina presence:
KSM Castings, Shelby
Haeco Cabin Solutions, High Point
Uniquetex, Grover
YanJan, Statesville
CARSgen Therapeutics, Durham
WH Group, parent company of Smithfield Foods, Tar Heel
Lenovo, Morrisville
WHY ROBBINSVILLE
How did a company 7,500 miles away find tiny Robbinsville? It starts with the 2014 closing of the Stanley plant, says Josh Carpenter, director of the seven-county Mountain West Partnership, which oversees regional economic development.
Stanley’s 601,000-square-foot building is the county’s “largest roof,” Carpenter says. In 2016, Oak Valley Hardwood moved into a “postage stamp” portion of the building, and about 30 workers rough-milled lumber and shipped it to China, where it was turned into furniture and other products. That business closed at the start of the pandemic in 2020.
The previous business owner tried to market the building on his own without success. In late 2023, after Carpenter convinced the owner to use a broker, the building immediately began to attract attention from data centers and potential tenants because of its size and available electric power. The all-brick building is “built like a tank,” says Carpenter. “There’s nothing else like it in the county.”
EcoKing’s parent company was scouring several Southern states to locate its first U.S. factory. A phone call from its real estate broker in Atlanta set the wheels in motion,
says Carpenter.
EcoKing needed a big building because it wants to build three production lines here. “More space equals more production equals more people,” says Carpenter.
Recruiting a Chinese company presented unique circumstances. Just before the first big meeting between Graham County leaders and EcoKing executives, Carpenter realized none of the N.C. team spoke Mandarin. A day before the meeting, he recruited Western Carolina University business professor Yue Cai Hillon, who is from the same region in China as EcoKing’s parent company. That was an unexpected bonus, Carpenter says.
The rest of the project followed a fairly normal process. “As everyone is, they were enamored with the beauty of the place, first,” says Carpenter.
State and local incentives totaling about $7.5 million, which are tied to meeting job and investment targets, helped close the deal. About 60 Chinese-owned companies operate in the state, though scrutiny has tightened in recent years as trade relations became more tense, according to state economic development officials.
EcoKing expects to draw workers from a 45-minute drive, including Cherokee, Macon and Swain counties. It plans to invest at least $10 million prepping the property over the next year and will use as many local workers as possible, Lin says. Construction jobs will employ about 100 people. EcoKing plans a showroom in Robbinsville for new customers, bringing more exposure to the region.
County residents also helped sell the project, says Carpenter. EcoKing executives ”just kept saying, ‘You all are the nicest people.’” ■