Chinese vinyl floor maker invests $26M in Georgia

Nanjing, China-based GreenView Floors International Inc. will invest $26 million in a manufacturing operation for vinyl and laminate flooring in Adairsville, Ga., creating 238 jobs.

The subsidiary of Nanjing MGM New Material Co. Ltd. (NJ MGM) will renovate a vacant building for its first U.S. manufacturing site.

"With a company mission of being dedicated to a greener environment and values persistent in business integrity, continuous improvement and customer satisfaction, we are eager to hire a world-class team in Adairsville. We are committed to long-term growth and hope to give back to both the community and the state of Georgia," NJ MGM Chairman Jason Liu said in a news release.

NJ MGM is a privately held company that specializes vinyl and laminate flooring for customers including Mannington USA, Hagebau German, Costco and Walmart. The parent company has 1.2 million square feet of manufacturing with 65 production lines and related equipment at its headquarters in Nanjing.

NJ MGM serves the residential and commercial flooring markets with luxury vinyl tile, wood-plastic composite, stone-plastic composites and laminates offered in thousands of colors, patterns and thicknesses. Products are exported globally including to the United States, Canada, Russia, Europe, Southeast Asia, South America and Africa.

Now some of those markets can be served from the Georgia site. Chang Shen, a representative of GreenView Floors, told local officials the Georgia site will primarily work with PVC and stone powder, according to a Nov. 17 story in The Daily Tribune News.

State and local officials said Georgia's business climate, skilled workforce and logistics network attracted GreenView Floors to Adairsville.

GreenView is being welcomed to Georgia at a time when the U.S. government has temporarily lifted tariffs on a big category of plastic flooring products imported from China, including luxury vinyl tile (LVT). That decision was announced Nov. 7 by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, which granted more than 30 tariff exemptions through Aug. 7, 2020.

The trade office did not say why it removed LVT from China tariffs. Trade officials apparently agreed with arguments that tariffs would hurt U.S. consumers more than they would help domestic manufacturers.

Pressure for tariffs had come last year from several U.S. LVT manufacturers, including Calhoun, Ga.-based Mohawk Industries Inc. and Mercerville, N.J.-based Congoleum Corp., which argued in government hearings that 25 percent duties on Chinese LVT would boost American manufacturing.

At the time, a Mohawk executive said imports from Asia, mostly from China, made up 55-70 percent of the U.S. LVT market. He told the August 2018 hearing that China exported $1.7 billion worth of LVT to the United States in 2017.