Albemarle HQ move to BR brings 30 jobs

• By GARY PERILLOUX
• Advocate business writer
• Published: Apr 30, 2008 - UPDATED: 3:50 p.m.

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Baton Rouge will become the official headquarters for Albemarle Corp., company and state officials announced this afternoon.

Though formally based in Richmond, Va., Albemarle has had about 600 Baton Rouge employees in it corporate offices in the Chase South Tower downtown and at its operations near ExxonMobil. They account for an annual payroll of about $60 million.

Albemarle will move 30 jobs out of Richmond to Baton Rouge, adding $7 million in annual payroll here. The state is providing $4.2 million in relocation incentives.

Having Albemarle headquartered in Baton Rouge will give Louisiana claim to five Fortune 1,000-sized company.

Albemarle traces its roots to Baton Rouge’s old Ethyl Corp.

In 1962, Virginia paper magnate Floyd D. Gottwald Sr. feared — correctly — that baby boomers would grow up in a world where plastic sacks replaced paper bags at retail stores.

Searching for an investment that could catapult him onto the next technology wave, Gottwald spied an obscure Baton Rouge joint venture of Standard Oil (now ExxonMobil) and General Motors that made tetraethyl lead, a gasoline additive to prevent engine knocking.

Though Gottwald’s Virginia company, Albemarle Paper Manufacturing, was one-thirteenth the size of Ethyl Corp., Gottwald borrowed $200 million and completed what Forbes magazine heralded as the first modern-day leveraged buyout of a company.

Gottwald’s son, Floyd Jr., took command of the Baton Rouge company and the Virginia operations also adopted the Ethyl Corp. name. By the late 1960s, most of the paper assets were sold in an employee-led buyout that created the James River Corp. By the mid-1970s, Ethyl had exited the paper industry altogether.

Albemarle Corp. was spun off as a separate, publicly traded chemical company, producing flame retardants, the pain-relieving agents ibuprofen and naproxen, as well as antioxidants and other polymers that make plastics more flexible.