Facilities
The company's headquarters were located in the Reynolds Building in Winston-Salem for more than fifty years. Built in 1929, the 21-story building was designed by the same architects (Shreve & Lamb) who later designed the Empire State Building in New York City. In September 1977, R. J. Reynolds Industries moved the first of 1200 headquarters employees into the not-yet-completed, $40 million, 519,000-square-foot glass and steel World Headquarters Building being built across Reynolds Boulevard from the Whitaker Park cigarette manufacturing plant. At the same time, the company had plans for a new skyscraper downtown.
The current headquarters, the RJR Plaza Building, is 16 stories tall and was completed in 1982 adjacent to the original 1929 Reynolds Building. The tobacco company moved its headquarters to RJR Plaza in 1982, and the 1929 building continued to be used for some company offices until 2009; the older building currently stands vacant and has been considered for renovation as an upscale hotel.
With the parent company (renamed RJR Nabisco in 1985 after merging with Nabisco) planning to move its headquarters to Atlanta in September 1987, the company donated the World Headquarters Building to Wake Forest University in January 1987, and in July of that year, the company voted to move its Planters-Life Savers division to one-third of that building. In 2010, the building's tenants were Aon Corporation, BB&T, and PepsiCo.
R. J. Reynolds' largest plant, Tobaccoville, a 2 million square foot (190,000 m²) facility constructed in 1986, is located in the town of Tobaccoville, North Carolina near Winston-Salem.
It was announced in 2010 that cigarette manufacturing would cease at the company's Whitaker Park plant, located in Winston-Salem. Built in 1961, the plant had about 1 million square feet (90,000 m²) of manufacturing space. Manufacturing formerly performed at the Whitaker Park plant is to be consolidated in the more-modern Tobaccoville plant.
Macon manufacturing, located in Macon, Ga., resides in a 1.4 million square foot (130,000 m²) facility built in 1974. This manufacturing plant was formerly known as Brown & Williamson, which was purchased by Reynolds and eventually closed in 2006.
R. J. Reynolds has a tobacco-sheet manufacturing operation in Winston-Salem. The sheet manufacturing operation in Chester, Va. was closed in 2006. Also, there are leaf operations in Wilson, N.C.; tobacco-storage facilities in Blacksburg, S.C. and Richmond, Va.; and a significant research-and-development facility in Winston-Salem.
A manufacturing plant in Puerto Rico was closed in 2010.
Among these facilities, R. J. Reynolds employs approximately 6,800 people.
R. J. Reynolds' subsidiary R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Foreign Sales Corporation is established in the British Virgin Islands to minimize its tax liability.
Read more about this topic: R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company
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—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
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