While it didn’t entirely escape the national economy’s struggles, the Austin metro area continued to fare better than much of the United States in 2012. The area saw positive job growth and declining unemployment, and continued to lure major job-creating projects to Central Texas.
Here’s a look back at some of Central Texas’ top business stories for 2012:
In a year when “jobless recovery” became the de facto description of the U.S. economy, Austin continued to buck the national trend in 2012.
Companies in the greater metro area added more than 28,000 jobs through the first 10 months of the year, according to data from the Texas Workforce Commission, and they showed no evidence of slacking off in November and December.
The job growth – one of the fastest rates among the country’s 100 largest cities – helped keep unemployment rates well below state and national levels. Adjusted for seasonal employment trends, Austin’s jobless rate ran an average of 2.2 percentage points lower than the nation in 2012, and 1.2 percentage points lower than the state as a whole.
The local unemployment rate was 5.5 percent in October, its lowest point in almost four years. (The workforce commission released November’s employment figures on Friday, after the advance deadline for Sunday’s newspaper.)
The vast majority of industries in the region posted job gains during 2012. Central Texas’ average monthly payrolls in both the goods-producing and services sectors increased 4.1 percent and 2.7 over last year’s averages, according to commission data.
The usual suspects provided the biggest push behind the job growth. The ongoing population and development boom in the area produced a 9.6 percent increase in construction jobs when comparing October to December 2011.
Professional, scientific and technical services companies, which include many of Austin’s high-tech firms, expanded their payrolls by 9.5 percent. And the number of jobs at health care and social assistance firms expanded by 6.4 percent.
One of the biggest wins of 2012 for area business recruiters was convincing Apple Inc. to choose Austin for its proposed new operations center — a facility expected to create more than 3,600 local jobs.
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Samsung Electronics Co. is in the process of spending up to $4 billion in converting roughly half of its Austin chip manufacturing operation to a new, potentially more profitable product.
The South Korean company, which is the world’s second-largest chipmaker, reiterated in December that its latest Austin project - the retrofitting of half of its main fabrication operation in Northeast Austin - is expected to cost about $4 billion and go into commercial production in the second half of 2013.
The project will shift much of the production of the Austin factory from flash memory chips to advanced low-power processors that are used in mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.
The revamped part of the factory will make processors with critical dimensions as small as 28 nanometers, a reduction in size of from the existing manufacturing technology used at the Austin plant. That advance translates into lower production costs, higher production quantities and lower power consumption by those chips.
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Visa also plans to add 800 new jobs to the area. Elsewhere in the state the Eagle Ford shale formation oil play has added thousands of new jobs to South Texas and San Antonio. the Midland and Odessa area has the smallest unemployment figures in the country and workers are so scarce the fast food chains like McDonalds are paying $20 an hour. The energy business is also growing in Houston which has one of the lowest jobless rates for major metropolitan areas.
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