After unveiling a new drug substance facility in North Carolina in December, Amgen is doubling down on expanding its U.S. production presence with plans for a major upgrade at its plant in central Ohio.
The new project represents the latest in a string of pharma investments in the U.S. as the Trump administration threatens to clamp down on the industry with sector-specific import tariffs.
Amgen is plugging $900 million into an expansion of its biomanufacturing facility in New Albany, Ohio, the company said Friday. The project is expected to bring the total number of Amgen jobs in the state to 750 and increase the company’s overall investment in Ohio to more than $1.4 billion.
Amgen was largely mum on the details about what sorts of features or added capacity the expansion will deliver.
“Today's investment reinforces our ongoing commitment to expanding U.S. manufacturing and ensuring patients around the world have access to our innovative medicines," the company’s CEO, Robert Bradway, said in a statement. Bradway justified the company’s decision to build in Ohio by pointing to the state’s “supportive business climate, skilled workforce and strategic location.”
Amgen first announced it was setting up manufacturing operations in central Ohio in June 2021. Amgen cut the ribbon at the New Albany plant last February, at the time calling it the “most advanced facility” in its production network.
The nearly 300,000-square-foot plant—initially devoted to final product assembly and packaging—debuted with around 400 full-time employees, plus an automated storage retrieval system and a triumvirate of automated guided vehicles named Apollo, Hercules and Zeus designed to ferry materials from Amgen’s warehouse to the production area and back.
Amgen used its expansion announcement to highlight its history of U.S. investments, which have reached nearly $5 billion since the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act during President Donald Trump’s first term in 2017.
With the threat of tariffs swirling, several other prominent executives in the industry have pointed to the importance of tax policy in encouraging the onshoring of production.
“If what you want is to build manufacturing capacity in the U.S., both in medtech and in pharmaceuticals, the most effective answer is not tariffs, but tax policy,” Johnson & Johnson’s CEO, Joaquin Duato, said on his company’s earnings call earlier this month.
Meanwhile, speaking to analysts on AbbVie’s first-quarter earnings call Friday, the Chicago drugmaker’s chief financial officer, Scott Reents, posited that a “more competitive tax policy, building on what was accomplished through 2017 tax reform, will encourage a sustainable shift towards U.S. manufacturing over the long term.”
Amgen’s latest outlay isn’t on the same scale as some other pharma investments that have followed Trump’s tariff threat. It also comes after the California drugmaker announced a similar $1 billion project at its Holly Springs manufacturing site in North Carolina in December.
Drugmakers and manufacturers alike have announced a slew of U.S. investments in recent weeks, with Thermo Fisher, Regeneron and Roche most recently jumping on the onshoring bandwagon.
Meanwhile, Novartis, Eli Lilly and Johnson & Johnson have pledged to plug $23 billion, $27 billion and $55 billion into their U.S. operations, respectively, over the next several years.
While several of the companies’ investment pledges have included nods to R&D, the vast majority seem principally concerned with enhancing domestic pharmaceutical production.