As many as 1,000 new jobs are coming to metro Denver as part of DirecTV’s expansion plans, the nation’s largest satellite-television provider said Wednesday.
DirecTV, based in El Segundo, Calif., will begin hiring at the end of the year for a new call center in Arapahoe County that could eventually pump $52 million annually in wages into the metro economy.
The call center is slated to open in early 2007, but DirecTV did not say when all the jobs would be filled. The center will be the national hub for DirecTV’s customer-support services, the company said.
The center’s employees will work for DirecTV and not an independent contractor, the company said. Types of jobs will include customer service, information technology, data-center operations and management.
The average salary will be $52,000 a year, according to state and local economic-development officials.
Colorado has offered up to $800 in job-training funds for as many as 300 jobs, a total of $240,000 in incentives, said Jeff Holwell, an official with the state’s Economic Development Office.
Arapahoe County has offered the company a five-year, 50 percent tax break on personal property taxes, according to the South Metro Denver Chamber of Commerce.
New-job announcements of this size are rare, said Tom Clark, executive vice president of the Metro Denver Economic Development Corp.
“Any time you get above 500, it’s a really big deal,” Clark said, adding that in-house call centers typically provide good training, pay and benefits.
DirecTV is expanding in the backyard of its chief competitor, Douglas County-based EchoStar Communications. DirecTV has 15.4 million customers nationwide; EchoStar, provider of the Dish Network, is the nation’s second-largest satellite-TV company, with 12 million subscribers. EchoStar has three call centers in metro Denver, employing more than 1,700 people.
DirecTV’s call center will be in a six-story, 257,000-square foot building at the Inverness Business Park.
DirecTV will lease the building and plans to add $12 million worth of furniture and equipment, said Bart Sayyah, director of economic development for the South Metro Denver Chamber of Commerce.
The building is the former headquarters of ICG Communications, a telecommunications company acquired this year by Broomfield’s Level 3 Communications.
“With the concentration of telecommunications businesses, along with the enormously talented workforce, it made sense for us to expand our operations and create jobs here,” said John Suranyi, president of DirecTV sales and service, in a statement.
The company has about 260 employees at an operations center in metro Denver and 110 employees at an uplink facility in Castle Rock, which uplinked DirecTV’s first signals 12 years ago.
After the new jobs are created, metro Denver will have the second-largest concentration of DirecTV workers after El Segundo. DirecTV, which is controlled by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., employs more than 9,000 nationwide.
DirecTV also owns and operates call centers in Boise, Idaho; Huntsville, Ala.; and Tulsa, Okla. It will open a technical call center in Missoula, Mont., this summer. DirecTV said creation of the Denver hub was due to growth, not consolidation of operations.
Staff writer Andy Vuong can be reached at 303-820-1209 or avuong@denverpost.com.
