PORT ISABEL, Texas - Saronic Technologies, the Austin-based defense technology startup that is considering building a shipyard at the Port of Brownsville, places a big emphasis on developing a young workforce.
So says Chris Johnson, director for the company’s shipyard in Franklin, Louisiana.
“Saronic is really, really good at is bringing on younger talent and training it,” Johnson said, during a presentation he and three of his colleagues made to Point Isabel ISD.
By way of an example, Johnson told the story of the shipyard in Franklin.
“Louisiana has long had a problem with young graduates in STEM, specifically engineering, electrical, and mechanical. Many different types of engineers have to leave Louisiana… because there aren't good jobs for those professionals. But we're helping reduce what they call the brain drain, where young professionals leave because there's not enough jobs for them. Saronic has done a really good job of addressing that in Franklin. I suspect we'll do it here again in Brownsville, given that chance.”
Johnson said there is a “buzz around Saronic” because “our culture is different.”
Doug Lambert, a co-founder and COO of Saronic, agreed.
“We've up skilled that workforce (in Louisiana). We have welders who are becoming engineers. We have pipe fitters who are growing in their careers. And that's something that's incredibly important to Saronic. We have a robust kind of jobs skill training pipeline that we've been prototyping here in Louisiana, and could potentially bring here to Brownsville, Texas.”
Lambert said the company thinks about manufacturing differently to most.
“These are not dirty jobs. We think about them in a way that is incredibly, incredibly tech-forward and people-forward and process-forward. So we tend to invest in our employees. We like to up-skill and create new opportunities that folks otherwise wouldn't have gotten in the area. And that really is reflected in how we build out infrastructure,” Lambert said.
Natalie Wiegand, vice president of global expansion and integration for Saronic, said the company takes a holistic approach to building its workforce.
“We partner with schools, we offer a very, very robust internship program from day one,” Wiegand said.
“We're probably the first generation seeing someone go from welding to being a software engineer. Because truly, you don't have to have a degree in computer science anymore. You don't have to have formal training. If you come up and you're interested and willing to learn, you can be a software engineer (at Saronic).”
Wiegand said Saronic offers a very generous benefits package for every employee.
“It's fairly rare to have one single large company where you can hire thousands of welders and bearers, structural gravitators and CNT operators, and also be hiring and employing the top AI robotics engineers in the country,” Wiegand said.
“But with autonomous systems, we need very, very, very advanced R&D engineering, both in mechanical and electrical label architecture. And this is really important for crafting the benefits package, because we have one benefits program across the entire company.”
Wiegand said Dino Mavrookas, Saronic’s CEO, has the same benefits package as everyone else in the company.
“This is where the marrying of extremely high tech and manufacturing creates a beautiful environment, where a welder or a production assistant has the same benefits package as a software engineer from Google or Meta in the Bay Area. That’s because that's where we're recruiting a lot of talent from. We need to have the best software engineers in the world. They're coming from places like Apple and Facebook and Google and Tesla, and they're not going to join a company with a lack of a benefits package.”
Wiegand said the average salary at Saronic is $90,000. She said this is “extremely high” for a company that does as much heavy industry as Saronic.
“We also give equity to every single employee. There are no exceptions. If you're an employee at Saronic, you receive options in the company. So what that means is, if Saronic succeeds, you succeed,” Wiegand said.
“(We do this) because we want people that are working for the mission of the company. (We want them to think) “if I take a short cut here and it hurts the company, I'm hurting my own financial future. (With Saronic) every employee stands to win, and this is the kind of wealth that can become life-changing wealth.”
As well as educating the community, the Saronic executives were at Point Isabel to try to persuade the school district to give them a tax break. And they did.
“This is an important conversation for us, and more importantly, we’re very excited, very honored to be here and to be participating in your community in this way,” Lambert said.
“We want to give back to the community. We want to build infrastructure. We want to create jobs. Yes, we've raised a lot of capital. We have the ability to go and mobilize that capital in a way that's impactful to communities like Brownsville. But more importantly, we're not SpaceX. We don't have an unlimited budget, so conversations like this are really important for us.”
Lambert said Saronic thinks of itself as both a shipbuilding and a technology company.
“This shouldn't be new to you. You've been adjacent to the Port of Brownsville for most of your lives. We live and breathe salt water. This is something that we're very passionate about. More importantly, we're marrying technology with the maritime industry. And bringing autonomous ships into that space really reinvigorates the manufacturing process in the process,” Lambert said.
Lambert also explained that Saronic Technologies is global in nature.
“We may be stationed in Central Texas but we have test facilities on both coasts of the United States, and we're also expanding internationally, in Australia, in the United Kingdom. That's really important to us for a couple of different reasons. One, we sell to the defense market, but we also sell commercially. And because we're a commercial company… it allows us to export that technology outside of the United States, as well as take some of the lessons that we've learned in Finnish yards or Korean yards, and really improve the way in which America is doing ship production.”
Lambert said that when Saronic Technologies acquired an old shipyard in Louisiana it went from 23 employees to 223 in the better part of six months. “The first boats landed in June, so, less than two months after we acquired that yard. We plan on bringing that rapidity and that really fervor for production to (potentially) Brownsville. Most importantly, I'd like to highlight that we wouldn't have been able to do this without the expert ship builders that we found in Louisiana. And we're very excited, we believe that that same level of skill and talent exists in this (Brownsville) geography, and we couldn't be happier to engage and find those folks and bring them into the Saronic family.”
Lambert said it is possible larger and larger ships would be built at the Port of Brownsville, “in a way that is kind of novel to the United States, to really re-industrialize the maritime industry.”
After Vibhav Altekar, a co-founder and the CTO at Saronic, spoke in-depth about the technical side of the company’s operations, Wiegand explained what might happen at the Port of Brownsville. She said the project has been titled Port Alpha although one of its working titles was Project Gondor.
“The gist of what we're looking at is a little over 600 acres of development, a $3.2 billion investment, over 10,000 direct jobs that we would hire as full-time employees, and we'd be breaking ground as soon as possible this year,” Wiegand said.
“So, why Port Alpha is important is, obviously, the commercial side, which Doug mentioned earlier, but on the defense side, this is what the disparity looks like between our shipbuilding and the shipbuilding capabilities of China,” Wiegand said, pointing to a slide in her power-point presentation.
“So they (China) outpace us by a factor of 230. They are making 23 million gross tons of ships. We're making 100,000. So you can think about every year that this goes on… the range, the distribution of what China is capable of versus the United States is getting dangerously, dangerously wide.
“So, bringing in Port Alpha, we close that gap very quickly, by matching 45% of the Chinese capacity. So, that's increasing the United States to building ten million gross tons annually. It doesn't necessarily make us equivalent with them (China), but it certainly gets us closer to the game.”
Wiegand pointed to a red triangle on a map of the Port of Brownsville. It showed roughly 605 acres that Saronic would lease at the Port of Brownsville.
“And everything that is in blue is a potential expansion site. We're not directly looking to lease it or operate it today. But one of the big reasons we were so interested in Brownsville and interested in this site is that opportunity for expansion. So, when looking at the map, we can see this is Highway 48. Here is where Saronic will be. You can see how far it is from each community.”
Right now, Saronic is waiting for the permits it needs, Wiegand explained.
“We can't control when we get permits and when we're allowed to start construction, but if permitted we would be breaking ground this summer. As soon as possible with construction,” Wiegand said.
“As far as hiring goes and when we would start hiring the first people, we have already started. We have our director of Port Alpha on the team. We're hiring for HR, we're hiring for project managers, engineers across the board. And for now we’re just having them all live in Austin temporarily until we decide where Port Alpha is going, and then they will relocate to wherever that site is. But as far as hiring, it's already started, and a capital investment is ready to go as soon as we're able to break ground.”
Wiegand then explained the community impact.
“As far as community impact, we're looking at $168 billion. That is just in Cameron County. When you look at the state of Texas, this number goes up to, I think it's $264 billion. Not just the 10,000 direct jobs that we're hiring, the full-time employees, but an additional 9,500 in indirect labor and indirect jobs within the community. Total wages earned will be $1.4 billion through support jobs, and total wages will be $830 million.”
Editor's Note: Reporter Luis Montoya assisted with the story from Reynosa.
Editor's Note: Here is an audio recording of Saronic's presentation to Point Isabel ISD, courtesy Ron Whitlock Reports:
