Japanese equipment manufacturer Kubota Tractor Corp. and its financing arm Kubota Credit Corp. are leaving Torrance. And like a handful of other companies that have left the area lately, Kubota is decamping for the Lone Star State.

Kubota announced it plans to move its U.S. operations to Grapevine, Texas, part of the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area. That’s the same general area picked by Toyota Motor Corp., which announced last year it would move about 3,000 jobs from Torrance to Dallas suburb Plano, and Los Angeles coffee roaster Farmers Bros. Co., which has long been located just across the border from Torrance and announced recently that it will relocate to the town of Northlake, also near Dallas.

Officials with Kubota, a subsidiary of Osaka, Japan’s Kubota Corp., said Texas made the choice easy. Like Farmer Bros., they cited the state’s central location and business incentives.

“Their business-friendly climate, state incentives and geographical location were important factors in our final decision,” Kubota’s President and Chief Executive Masato Yoshikawa said in a statement.

The move will affect about 180 employees at the Torrance headquarters, located at 3401 Del Amo Blvd., according to Kubota spokeswoman Vanessa Sapino.

Some employees at a Kubota facility in Fort Worth, Texas, which employs about 100 workers, will also move to the new Grapevine facility, Sapino said.

“California has been good to us, but it makes better business sense for us to be centrally located, and we look forward to achieving added operational efficiencies with this move,” Yoshikawa said in a statement

Kubota’s move will create around 345 jobs in the state and bring with it $51 million in capital investment, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said in a statement. For expanding there, the company will receive a $3.8 million grant from the state.

Construction on Kubota’s Grapevine facility is scheduled to begin this year and be completed by 2017.