Canon U.S.A., a division of Canon Inc. (OTC: CAJPY), is exploring an expansion of its Orange County office footprint with a roughly 93,000-square-foot lease at Irvine’s Google Center.
Sources tell the Business Journal the company is in talks to take over a large part of the former Impac Mortgage Holdings Inc. headquarters building at 19500 Jamboree Road.
Impac this year terminated its longtime lease at the 210,000-square-foot office along Jamboree Road, near the intersection of MacArthur Boulevard, and relocated to a smaller base across the street.
Canon, which has over 180,000 employees worldwide, aims to use its new office for its camera and printer divisions, sources indicate.
The deal follows recently raised full-year projections by the Japanese optical imaging and industrial equipment company.
Increased Outlook
Canon’s new lease marks an expansion of its footprint in Irvine.
The $24 billion-valued company currently occupies over 200,000 square feet of office building space at 15975 Alton Parkway.
Canon also houses an arm of its medical device division elsewhere in the city at 2355 Main St.
Another Irvine site for the company’s medical device division spans 42,246 square feet at 9750 Irvine Blvd., where Canon has a training and education center.
Its lease negotiations at the Google Center come about two months after the company raised its 2023 net sales outlook to about $30 billion, up from $29 billion.
“In the second half of the year, we plan to grow new businesses such as network cameras, medical and commercial printing,” the company said in its second-quarter results.
Canon’s net sales for 2022 totaled $27 billion, up about 13% from the year prior.
Additionally, for the first time since 2008, the company is targeting operating profit of $2.7 billion, officials said in Canon’s financial results.
The company’s operating profit last year neared $2.4 billion, up roughly 25% from 2021.
Impac Giveback
Canon’s potentially new Irvine office is the old home of Impac, which paid $3 million earlier this year to get out of its lease totaling 120,000 square feet at the Google Center.
The mortgage lender had payments of $8.8 million remaining under its prior deal, which was due to run through September 2024, regulatory filings indicate.
Impac’s local footprint has since downsized to a 19,000-square-foot spot at the 4000 MacArthur office campus in Newport Beach, across the street from the Google Center.
The downsize is one of several corporate moves it has made of late “to navigate current market and industry conditions” affecting mortgage lenders across the country.
The company has maintained “a hybrid and remote workforce both during and following the COVID crisis, thereby minimizing physical office space needs,” the company said in a March 8 statement.
Impac’s employee count fell from 326 at the end of 2021 to just under 100 at the end of 2022, according to the company’s latest annual report.
Google Center Tenants
Canon may join Google and other tenants at the campus, including East West Bank, therapy provider YCBT Services, auto-financing company Consumer Portfolio Services Inc. (Nasdaq: CPSS), and high-end health club Equinox, which has a 30,000-square-foot gym at the site.
The 573,000-square-foot multibuilding campus sold in 2016 for $255 million to an entity controlled by Jack Dangermond, the billionaire founder of digital mapping company ESRI.
The deal at the time was the most expensive reported office sale in Orange County since 2012, at an estimated price of nearly $445 per square foot.
