Puerto Rico’s visitor economy has become the island’s largest source of direct employment, according to a historic 2025 analysis by the Foundation for Puerto Rico (FPR), a threshold that puts it ahead of manufacturing in direct jobs and local spend.
Behind that growth sits an entire support industry that rarely gets its own headline, including the companies that build, wire, print and staff the conventions, brand activations and live events that visitors and residents alike are spending record amounts to attend. Case in point: Ekelon, the San Juan company formerly known as E-Production. The firm is scaling up to meet higher demand, completing a $350,000 operational expansion built around a larger warehouse, new equipment and a corporate rebrand.
The FPR figures show that the visitor economy on the island generated upward of $7.8 billion in 2025, is expected to surpass $10 billion by 2028 and will approach $14 billion by 2030. Throw in $3.6 billion in local resident tourism spend and the multiplier effects of indirect and induced activity, and total visitor-related economic activity already exceeded $15 billion in 2024.
In direct employment, leisure and hospitality data included in the FPR report shows the sector now surpasses manufacturing, a crossover the report’s employment charts place within the past two years. Direct leisure and hospitality employment surpassed 100,000 jobs in Puerto Rico as of May 2025, with overall visitor-economy-related employment topping 115,000.
Counting indirect and induced jobs, FPR places total visitor-economy employment at roughly 202,000 islandwide in 2024, a figure the foundation expects to reach 186,000 in direct jobs alone by 2030.
That combination, more direct jobs than manufacturing and a growing share of local spending running through hotels, restaurants, transportation and event services, is what makes the visitor economy increasingly central to how Puerto Rico’s overall economy is described, alongside a manufacturing sector that still dominates exports and local corporate tax revenues.
The events and MICE sector riding that growth
Meetings, incentives, conventions and exhibitions, the segment of tourism that companies like Ekelon serve directly, are having a particularly strong run on the island.
Discover Puerto Rico announced at IMEX America in October 2025 that the island had reached all-time highs for MICE business, citing a wave of luxury hospitality investment that includes the first Four Seasons Resort & Private Residences in Río Grande, new Hilton properties in Dorado, the 2026 return of the Ritz-Carlton San Juan, and an $80 million apartment-hotel project breaking ground in San Juan’s Convention District.
Puerto Rico has since picked up the Stella Award for Best Convention Center among international and U.S. territory venues and hosted its first PCMA EduCon summit in July 2026.
Events support an integrated ecosystem of their own, including storage and logistics warehousing, design rooms, equipment inventories, and a network of creative talent, all working on ever tighter installation schedules and production timelines.
To capitalize on the growth and evolution of the industry, E-Production decided to execute its own evolution, following a growth run stretching over a decade, and now including a rebrand to Ekelon. The Puerto Rican company has evolved from supplying production components to serving as an integrated partner for event producers, agencies, marketing teams and companies that need to turn an idea into an executed experience.
Ekelon’s offering brings together audiovisual services, lighting, sound, electrical support, furniture, structures, exhibits, printing, signage and promotional merchandise. For Adrián Del Río, president of Ekelon, that evolution has been driven directly by clients’ changing needs.
“We are behind the people who create and produce events. Our job is to provide the tools, equipment and support they need to turn those ideas into execution. As their projects have become larger and more complex, we have also had to expand our capacity to respond.”
The company’s response has been to invest at scale, culminating in a $350,000 operational expansion that includes facility improvements, new equipment and stronger internal processes. The operation will include 16,000 square feet in the La Marina sector of San Juan, dedicated to warehouse space, offices, equipment and materials used for installations and exhibits.
The new space also integrates offices, a conference room and advanced technology machinery for graphic cutting and printing. According to Gilberto Gandía, partner and operations director, the expansion allows the company to bring more processes under one roof and improve its ability to respond.
“This expansion allows us to operate in a much more integrated and efficient way. With more space, new machinery and more processes under one roof, we can have greater control over production timelines and respond more quickly to projects that increasingly require greater scale and complexity,” Gandía said.
Betting on Puerto Rico
The growth is also reflected in the company’s workforce. Ekelon currently generates 59 direct jobs and, for larger-scale projects, can incorporate up to 40 additional indirect jobs to respond to periods of high activity, a small-scale mirror of the same direct-plus-indirect employment pattern driving the island’s broader visitor economy.
With a stronger operational base in Puerto Rico, the company has begun extending its reach beyond the island. Ekelon has participated in projects in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Orlando, New York and Panama, coordinating design, equipment and execution components from Puerto Rico. The transformation also includes PromoLab, the company’s promotional merchandise division.
Strategically, the move marks an effort to formalize an operation that has grown alongside the events industry and now seeks to serve as a scalable platform for local and international projects. It is one company’s bet that Puerto Rico’s visitor economy, and the events business built around it, still has room to grow.
