Dive Brief:
- Eli Lilly will invest $400 million in manufacturing facilities in its hometown of Indianapolis, creating 100 new jobs, the pharma said Wednesday.
- The plans call for enhancements to existing facilities that produce insulin, more capacity for the company’s other diabetes treatments, and "initial capital investments for future medicines," Lilly said in a Nov. 20 statement.
- Lilly said it's also funding additional capacity and technology upgrades for active ingredient, syringe filling, device assembly and packaging operations.
Dive Insight:
Lilly touted how its latest investment reflects the company's commitment to U.S. manufacturing. The drugmaker said it’s made more than $5 billion in U.S. capital investments since 2012, which includes about $2 billion for the production of diabetes medicine. Most of the investments were made in Indiana.
CEO David Ricks said the 2017 tax overhaul made the latest investment possible. But the company has been steadily pouring money into U.S. manufacturing long before the windfall that came with the lower tax rates generated by the new law.
In 2017, Lilly earmarked $850 million for expanding and upgrading U.S. operations, with $72 million spent on building out insulin manufacturing capacity in Indianapolis.
And the industry in general hasn’t been generating new jobs at the rate predicted by proponents of the tax overhaul back in 2017. A BioPharma Dive review earlier this year showed that top U.S. drugmakers saw their effective tax rates drop almost 6 percentage points while creating a negligible amount of new positions.
Lilly's latest cash infusion will benefit the company’s Lilly Technology Center campus in Indianapolis. In its statement, the company highlighted its "next generation manufacturing," including investments in automation, robotics and advanced data analytics.
The drugmaker said it’s seeing increased demand for current medicines and wants to be ready to produce therapies that are now in its pipeline.
Local officials hailed Lilly's announcement.
"It is clear that Lilly will remain a staple in our state for many generations to come, serving customers around the world while giving back to the Indianapolis community here at home," Indiana Secretary of Commerce Jim Schellinger said in the statement released by the company.