NEW YORK -- Exxon Corp., the world's largest oil company, in a surprise announcement Thursday said it will move its headquarters next year because it is too difficult to attract promising managerial talent to New York.
Chairman Lawrence Rawl told the subdued 300 headquarters personnel assembled in the company cafeteria in the Exxon skyscraper they would move next fall to temporary quarters near Dallas in Irving, Texas, where a new headquarters will be built by mid-1993.
In a statement issued late in the day, Republican mayoral candidate Rudolph Giulani said Rawl had sent him a letter saying it was important to Exxon to give promising professional and managerial talent the opportunity to work at headquarters.
'Recently it has been difficult to attract some of these people to New York City,' Giuliani quoted Rawl as saying in the letter. Giuliani said, 'I find this news extremely disturbing.'
No confirmation of the Rawl quote could be obtained from Exxon.
Exxon's headquarters has been located at 1250 Avenue of Americas since 1972, when the oil company erected the Exxon building in conjunction with the Rockefeller Center complex, which owned half of it.
The Exxon building was sold for $610 million to Mutsui Fudosan (NY) Inc., a subsidiary of the Japan's Mitsui company, in late 1986. An Exxon employee said the company has been looking to relocate since then.
'We concluded that, on balance the Dallas area offered the best combination of factors from the standpoint of our employees' personal and professonal lives and from an overall business standpoint. Both aspects were important in our final decision,' said Rawl.
A company analysis took into account the cost of doing business, living costs, commuting to and from the job, accessibility of air travel and the overall business climate, Rawl said in an Exxon statement.
The announcement came as a surprise New York City officials, who have been working hard to sell corporate America on the advantages of Manhattan.
'It came as a bit of a surprise to us,' said Stanley Grayson, New York deputy mayor for finance and development.
He said Exxon had been contacted as recently as a year ago and the company indicated it had no intentions of moving.
When a company intends to move, it usually informs city officials. 'That did not occur here,' Grayson said. 'Obviously, we're not pleased.'
In a statement, Mitsui said it had known about the Exxon move 'for some time' and several major corporations had expressed interest in the space.
Grayson saw the Exxon announcement as the final phase of the movement of oil companies from New York and not indicative of a general overall corporate exodus from the skyscraper canyons of Manhattan.
He noted that RJR Nabisco Inc. recently moved its headquarters from Atlanta to New York.
Shell Oil Co. moved to Houston in the 1960s, Texaco Inc. transferred to nearby White Plains, N.Y., and Atlantic Richfield Co. moved to Los Angeles in the 1970s, Grayson said.
Mobil Corp., the nation's No. 2 oil company, is moving its headquarters to Fairfax county in northern Virginia outside Washington because it had difficulty getting employees to transfer to New York in face of the high cost of living and long commute to work.
A Mobil spokesman said 30 percent of the initial group of 500 employees transferred this past year elected not to make the move and left the company. The remaining 1,500 are scheduled to complete the move by the fall of 1990.
The departure of Exxon and Mobil removes two of the three largest U.S. companies in the top 50 listed by Fortune Magazine in April as having their headquarters in Manhattan.
Only Philip Morris and RJR Nabisco remain in New York of the top 50 listed by Fortune, with another six in the surrounding areas. .
No immediate comment on the Exxon move could be obtained from David Dinkins or Rudolph Guilani, the Democrat and Republican candidates to succeed Edward Koch as New York mayor.
In Dallas, Texas Gov. Bill Clements, who apparently was kept in the dark about the move dubbed 'Project Everglades' by those making the site selection, welcomed Exxon but denied there had been 'an intensive recruiting effort.'
Exxon is the nation's third-largest company overall, ranking behind General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor Co. It had sales of $92.4 billion in 1988.
The oil company has been gradually reducing its presence in the Rockefeller Center building since the 1970s.
Exxon had more than 2,000 employees in the Exxon building before transferring international operations to Florham, N.J., and chemical headquarters units to Darien, Conn.
At one time, Exxon occupied about half of the skyscraper's 53 stories, but its space had declined to six floors in the last few years, a company spokesman said.
The oil giant has been cutting back drastically over the past ten years. In 1981, it employed nearly 180,000 worldwide. A spokesman said the company currently employs about 100,000.
On Monday, Exxon announced its third-quarter earnings had dropped 9.4 percent to $1.1 billion because of lower profits from its petroleum marketing and chemical operations.
Exxon said the Las Colinas development in Irving is located about 10 miles from downtown Dallas and is near the Dallas-Fort Worth airport.
The company said employees were told the company recognized the disruption to their lives and would do everything to smooth the transition.
