Dive Brief:
- Eli Lilly on Tuesday said it will invest about $470 million in building a new drug manufacturing plant in Durham, North Carolina, an expansion the Indianapolis pharma said would create some 460 jobs.
- The facility will be located in Research Triangle Park, a hub for biomedical research in the state, and focus on the production of injectable medicines and delivery devices.
- Lilly pledged to pay an average salary of more than $72,000 across the 400-plus skilled jobs it envisions creating. The average wage in Durham County is $71,756.
Dive Insight:
Lilly's new plant is part of wave of investments the drugmaker is making in U.S. manufacturing, spurred — company CEO David Ricks claims — by the 2017 tax law signed into law by President Donald Trump.
Since 2012, Lilly has invested more than $5 billion in the U.S., including a November announcement of $400 million earmarked for facilities in its hometown of Indianapolis.
Generally, the company reports about $1 billion to $1.2 billion in capital expenditures each year, according to its latest annual filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
North Carolina wooed Lilly to the region with a Job Development Investment Grant worth as much as $8.7 million spread out over 12 years. The project will give the state's economy an estimated $4.1 billion boost over that time, Lilly claimed.
The agreement also includes as much as $2.9 million for North Carolina's Industrial Development Fund-Utility Account, which rural communities use to upgrade infrastructure.
The planned Durham facility will focus on injectable drugs, a reference to the biologic medicines that now account for much of large drugmaker revenues. The plant will add to a production network of seven sites spread across Indiana, New Jersey and Puerto Rico.
The facility should be operational by 2023, said a Lilly spokeswoman, who declined to outline the phases for spending the planned investment.