Meet the Chinese telecom firm that just leased 75,000 square feet in Santa Clara

July 11, 2016

In just 11 years, Cambridge Industries Group has gone from a startup with a couple of employees in China to a major player in the telecom industry, with customers that include some of the world’s biggest networking players.

Now it’s making an ambitious entry into Silicon Valley with plans to open a 75,000-square-foot office in Santa Clara at Irvine Company’s Santa Clara Square.

“Our people right now spend a lot of time in the U.S. We have an office in New Jersey, and we’ve been traveling and staying in Silicon Valley, but we want to enhance that presence,” CEO Gerald Wong told me in an interview last week. Marketing, sales, customer support and R&D will be housed at the new facility.

The Shanghai-based company designs and manufactures what’s called “customer premise equipment,” which can include everything from routers and switches to set-top boxes and Internet “gateways.” Customers include Ericsson, Nokia, Alcatel-Lucent and others.

Its current Silicon Valley presence is small, but CIG could have several hundred workers at Santa Clara Square within a couple of years, said Wong, who studied at MIT in the 1980s (hence the firm’s name).

And CIG is contemplating another kind of expansion: Manufacturing. Wong said he’s interested in doing some kind of warehouse or manufacturing in Silicon Valley, likely in the East Bay.

The expansion here is being driven by a trend in the industry in which information technology is “merging” with telecom, Wong said. “It’s really hard to differentiate them anymore,” he said. “We are getting more customers in data center, switching, enterprise and wireless. They’re also located in Silicon Valley in the U.S. That’s one reason (for the new office).”

CIG will be occupying two floors at 2445 Augustine Dr., which is one of two new buildings that will be coming online as part of the second phase at Santa Clara Square. It’ll be the second tech company (after Ericsson) to locate at the campus, which is slated to include a whopping 1.7 million of office space, 1,800 apartments and 165,000 square feet of retail on roughly 80 acres.

“The things we heard were important from them were that the identity and quality level of the project, and the access to amenities,” said Todd Hedrick, regional vice president for Irvine Company Office Properties. “We think it’s one of the things that distinguishes Square: the overall amenities base.”

It was reported recently, Whole Foods is planning to open July 26, and Irvine also signed retailers including Sur La Table, Books Inc., Opa! and others.

Irvine still has a large amount of office space to lease: Five 220,000-square-foot office towers are underway with completion staggered between late 2016 and mid 2017. Three 220,000-square-foot buildings are complete, with two of them leased (by Ericsson).

Hedrick said there continues to be active discussions for whole-building and multiple-building tenants at Square. “The project is just starting to really come online with the retail slated to open up here in the next couple of weeks.”

The building that CIG is going into will house multiple tenants. “With this deal, we kicked off” the smaller-tenant leasing, Hedrick said. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but Irvine is asking $3.75 per square foot per month on a triple-net basis.

CIG’s Wong said the office should start with about 50 employees but the company plans to ramp up quickly. It’s currently officing at Irvine’s McCarthy Ranch development in Milpitas.

What made the difference for CIG to lease at Santa Clara Square? “First of all, it was good quality, it’s definitely not the lower-cost buildings,” Wong said. “But we’re not a startup anymore. We’re serving major companies now, and we need a comfortable location.”

Wong also said he liked being in the center of the Valley and proximity to Fremont, where CIG is studying “possible manufacturing and warehouse.”

“We have very close friendships with people in the U.S. studying the possibility of doing manufacturing in the U.S.,” he said. “Re-shoring isn’t as easy as everyone thinks, but it’s possible.”