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Cryoport HQ Shifts To Nashville Area

Cryoport Inc., the fast-growing provider of cold-chain logistics services for the biopharmaceutical industry, is the latest local company to move its headquarters to the area around Nashville, Tenn.

Unlike automaker Mitsubishi Motors North America Inc., which sold its Cypress headquarters in November and relocated most of its local operations to the area around Nashville, officials said Cryoport (Nasdaq: CYRX) plans to keep a large portion of its existing operations in Irvine.

“Our Global Logistics Center in Irvine will remain our Center of Excellence and is also the primary location of our engineering team and the incubator for new technologies,” Cryoport officials told the Business Journal this month in a statement.

“We currently have approximately 65 employees based in Irvine and that number is expected to continue to grow in 2020 and beyond,” the company said.

The company’s executive team, though, has moved out-of-state. Chief Executive Jerrell Shelton and other executives of Cryoport recently moved to Brentwood, a suburb of Nashville, according to the company.

Shelton attended the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, from 1967 to 1970, according to his LinkedIn page. Shelton, who has been CEO of Cryoport since 2012, also has an MBA from Harvard University.

The company’s new headquarters there run about 4,200 square feet, according to regulatory filings.

Cryoport’s Irvine hub, near the headquarters campus of Edwards Lifesciences Corp. (NYSE: EW), runs 27,000 square feet.

Its lease for the Irvine space, a mix of corporate, research and development, and logistics facilities, expires in early 2023, and the company has the option to extend the lease for two additional five-year periods, according to its latest quarterly report.

Cryoport helps biopharmaceutical firms transport biological material used in clinical trials, and its temperature-controlled containers and logistics services are increasingly in demand from customers in the U.S. and abroad.

Its revenue for the first nine months of 2019 was $24.7 million, a nearly 78% increase from year-ago levels.

The company counts a market value of nearly $670 million; its shares are up about 80% year-over-year.

Closer to Europe

The relocation comes as the firm was seeing more business from Europe, officials said.

The company expects “further globalization of our business. As a result, we wanted to have our corporate HQ more centrally located in the U.S. and also be in a time zone that was closer to Europe,” the company told the Business Journal.

“Secondarily, we felt the city of Nashville offered us the ability to attract new employees with healthcare and logistics backgrounds,” the company said.

Nashville and its international airport is a major hub for the logistics industry, as is Memphis, home to FedEx Corp.

It is 85% more expensive to live in Irvine than the Nashville region, mostly because of housing, according to online data.

Vanderbilt University and Vanderbilt University Medical Center is the largest employer in the Nashville area, according to city economic figures. No. 6 is Nissan North America Inc., a sister company to Mitsubishi that has its headquarters in Franklin, Tenn., a suburb of Nashville.

Mitsubishi last July announced plans to relocate to the Nashville area to “take advantage of [its] vibrant technology skillset, all while realizing cost savings through the business-friendly work environment and proximity to sister company, Nissan.”

The carmaker’s recently sold former headquarters in Cypress held roughly 200 Mitsubishi employees as of mid-2019.

Cryoport did not address the tax implications of its move out of California.

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Mark Mueller
Mark Mueller
Mark is the Editor-in-Chief of the Orange County Business Journal, one of the premier regional business newspapers in the country. He’s the fifth person to hold the editor’s position in the paper’s long history. He oversees a staff of about 15 people. The OCBJ is considered a must-read for area business executives. The print edition of the paper is the primary source of local news for most of the Business Journal’s subscribers, which includes most of OC’s major corporate and community players. Mark’s been with the paper since 2005, and long served as the real estate reporter for the paper, breaking hundreds of commercial and residential real estate stories. He took on the editor’s position in 2018.
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