Booker to announce move of Pitney Bowes international mail center to Newark

The site at 158 Mount Olivet Avenue and Newark Mayor Corey Booker

Mayor Corey Booker is expected to announce a deal with Stamford, Conn.-based Pitney Bowes tonight, which signed a seven-year lease to relocate its international mail distribution center to Newark, a deal that will bring 180 jobs to the city and provide for another 25 new jobs over the next five years.

Pitney Bowes agreed to lease 76,000 square feet of space at 158 Mount Olivet Avenue, an existing Urban Enterprise Zone location that includes 64,000 square feet of production space and 12,000 square feet of office space. The new facility will be used to sort 50 million pieces of international mail per year.
UEZ was established by the state of New Jersey in 1983 to revitalize urban communities and stimulate growth by encouraging businesses to develop and create private sector jobs through investment.

“This part of our business — a combination of international mail and the pre-sorting of domestic mail — has been a very rapidly growing part of Pitney Bowes,” said spokesperson Matthew Broder, in a telephone interview. “As the network has grown, we’ve been on a pretty constant search for facilities to keep up with it.”

The deal will be announced at Booker’s annual State of the City address tonight at Newark Symphony Hall. The first employees are expected to move into the site next month.

The deal was finalized after Pitney Bowes hired Cushman & Wakefield to conduct an extended search for larger facilities. In 2003, Pitney originally acquired College Point, Queens-based International Mail Express, for $29 million and relocated that business to Clifton, N.J.

Newark’s Brick City Development and the New Jersey Economic Development Authority helped negotiate the agreement for Pitney Bowes to locate its distribution center to Newark. The firm will receive a Business Relocation and Economic Assistance grant and a Business Employment Incentive Program grant for relocating here.

Broder said about a half dozen locations in New York and New Jersey were under consideration. He declined to disclose the names of the other cities. The firm has agreed to make a “good faith” effort to hire qualified residents of Newark to work at the facility.

In a statement, Booker said of the deal: “We are very pleased that Pitney Bowes, one of the nation’s largest providers of international mail services, is recognizing Newark’s ideal location for the logistics industry by moving a major business unit to our city.”