Holon CEO shares long-term vision for Jax manufacturing amid tariff uncertainty (Courtesy of the Jacksonville Business Journal) — Markus Schlitt, the CEO of Holon Global and Holon U.S., made his first visit to Jacksonville this week and shared more about the company’s mission and the development of its manufacturing plant here.
Schlitt described himself as the “new kid on the block” at Holon, taking the helm at the company nine weeks ago. But the new leader told the Jacksonville Business Journal that the company’s long-term goal is to bring manufacturing to the U.S. no matter the economic uncertainty, and that Jacksonville is at the heart of those plans.
The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
I think a lot has changed from when the project was first announced to now that you guys are officially coming here. How is all the economic uncertainty here and tariffs affecting just your plans here?
How I see it, we are here for the long run. So we plan to stay. We’re not building a factory if we would not be committed, so short-term tariff aspects, these kinds of things are not really influencing the general decision. It might make it easier or harder, but in general, the decision to be here is the right one together with JTA as a strong lead partner.
That’s a great segue to my next question, seeing that there is a big push for getting manufacturing away from overseas and domestically, just how does that speak to the importance of your project, bringing more manufacturing here to Jacksonville?
I think the current decision-making by the government is supporting our case, but I think we would have made the same decision anyway. We want to be a fit-for-purpose AV vehicle manufacturer, that means you need to be very close to your core market and to your customers, so we want to build Holon as a U.S. company serving the U.S. customer base with these fit-for-purpose vehicles, and that’s why the manufacturing has to be here besides the economic aspect.
How are you liking (Jacksonville) so far?
I love it and I love how stringent JTA is and (that they have) developed a vision and how thoroughly thought through they’re moving step by step in implementing the strategy. Everything fits together and that they’re now starting with the first autonomous vehicles, they will learn a lot while operating them and then our vehicles are hopefully ready by 2027, 2028 to get deployed in the roads. Everything makes sense and everything follows a plan.
And then longer term, just what are you hoping to see from this manufacturing and distribution center here? Obviously, Jacksonville’s getting your start with the vehicles, but are you hoping to have wider distribution to other cities, other states?
Yeah, so the plan is to serve the entire U.S. market out of Jacksonville, the factory, but also engineering capabilities, sales, all these functions needed to serve the U.S. market. The U.S. headquarters will be in Jacksonville, together with the factory, and the factory, in the beginning, will serve the US market and export, and we can go up to three shifts. So there’s a lot of capacity we can either use for the U.S. market, if the US market asks for and that would be preferred, or we can use the capacity in addition for export business towards other markets we are serving. In our plans, the U.S. market is so big in size for this type of business, we think the factory will be very busy with U.S. customers.
Anything else you can elaborate on the headquarters portion? Will it be located near your imeson facility or elsewhere?
That’s a good question. I’m not sure yet. We will have offices at the factory, but I think we also will have offices here downtown.