Monday, July 18, 2011

Hasbro plans $24M, 284-employee expansion in Providence

By Rodney H. Brown

Hasbro Inc. plans to expand in Providence, adding 284 employees to a new site at 15 LaSalle Square, and invest up to $24 million in the operation over three years. The state of Rhode Island has awarded Hasbro $1.6 million in tax breaks as part of the expansion.

Hasbro (Nasdaq: HAS), based in Pawtucket, R.I., already lists 1,400 employees in the Ocean State, according to the AP report, and some of the company’s employees will relocate from the corporate headquarters. The new site will be near the new headquarters of 38 Studios LLC, Curt Schilling’s game development studio which relocated from Maynard to Providence in April. 

Earlier today, Hasbro announced that its second quarter numbers for 2011 were up from the same period last year in both revenue and profit, driven by a 96 percent growth in the Boys Products line on the strength of product tie-ins to the new Transformers movie.

In May, Hasbro announced plans to close game development operations in East Longmeadow, and relocate those 70 workers into Providence at a planned Center of Excellence for Games. An additional 75 workers will be laid off, and the remaining 750 factory and select corporate service employees at the East Longmeadow manufacturing plant will stay there, said Wayne Charness, senior vice president at Hasbro, at the time.

According to Charness, the new 15 LaSalle Square site will not be the home of the new games center, but a small number of the planned 284 new employees in Providence will be associated with that center when it launches. Following renovation of the 136,000 square-foot 15 LaSalle Street facility, the first employees will start occupying the site in the fall of 2012.