Pharma giant Amgen creating 350 jobs in Wake County after getting NC incentives
California pharmaceutical giant Amgen plans to build a manufacturing facility in Holly Springs and create more than 350 jobs in the coming years, after it landed an incentive package from the state and local governments on Tuesday.
Amgen, one of the largest drug makers in the country, will get a Job Development Investment Grant from the state worth around $12.6 million.
Locally, Wake County and Holly Springs will add around $22.8 million in incentives to the project as well.
The state incentives were approved at the state’s Economic Investment Committee meeting in Raleigh on Tuesday morning. The grant will only be paid out if Amgen meets certain hiring and investment milestones.
The announcement is yet another economic development win for Wake County in recent months, which has landed large commitments from companies like Apple, Gilead Sciences and Fujifilm Diosynth. The biotechnology industry, in particular, has been a big focus point of the state’s recruitment efforts in the past four years.
Gov. Roy Cooper said the state has now recruited 47 life-sciences projects since 2017 — which have combined commitments to create 7,200 jobs.
“This continues our quest to make North Carolina the best biotechnology-life-sciences cluster in the United States,” Cooper said during an event announcing the jobs.
“Cambridge and Boston better look out because North Carolina is coming,” Cooper added, referring to the large life-sciences hub that exists in the Boston region.
Amgen, the maker of popular drugs such as the arthritis treatment Enbrel, the bone-marrow stimulant Neulasta and osteoporosis medicine Prolia, will invest around $380.6 million into a manufacturing facility in Holly Springs as part of the grant agreement. But the company said Tuesday, it will ultimately invest around $550 million.
The jobs will pay an average wage of $119,510, according to the state’s Commerce Department.
Amgen employs more than 24,000 people around the world, and the company reported revenues of more than $25 billion last year. This will be the company’s first outpost in North Carolina, though it does have around 140 remote workers in the state, mainly working in sales positions.
Robert Kenyon, a vice president of manufacturing at Amgen, will be the site lead for the new Holly Springs facility. He previously worked in the Triangle and Boston for Biogen, and said his previous experience in Wake County was instrumental in its selection.
“The advantages of coming to North Carolina are very, very clear,” Kenyon said. “There’s a wealth of diverse talent, an educational system that is truly steeped in growing that talent pool ... and it’s a tremendous business environment.”
Kenyon said in an interview that Amgen has a purchase agreement at the Friendship Innovation Park in Holly Springs. Amgen will be the first tenant of that industrial site.
The facility, which the company hopes to open in 2025, wouldn’t focus on any particular line of products that Amgen has. Rather, Kenyon said, it will built to have the ability to flexibly switch from producing one drug to another quickly.
Kenyon said the company will hire across a range of experiences, and noted that Amgen has joined the OneTen coalition, along with 35 other large employers like IBM and Merck, to hire and train one million Black Americans over the next decade.
“There’ll be a range of manufacturing associates to supervisors to engineers to scientists and everything in between,” Kenyon said of its hiring plans.
Holly Springs was competing with Houston, Texas, for the project, according to the Commerce Department. Texas had offered the company $110 million worth of incentives, including property tax abatements and cash grants.
It is the second large life-sciences project that has been announced in Holly Springs, a southern Wake County town about 18 miles south of Raleigh, this year.
In March, Fujifilm Diosynth, a contract manufacturer for drug companies, said it would invest $1.5 billion into a new plant in Holly Springs.
That project, which will create 725 jobs, received $33 million in incentives from the state and another $92 million in local incentives.
Cooper said the state’s success in economic development projects is proof that it needs to up its investments in education and training.
“I think we are living off of a lot of previous investments over the decades,” Cooper said. The first thing he hears out of the mouths of CEOs looking to expand their business, the governor said, is tell me about your workforce.
“Trained, skilled people is the No. 1 thing that they want to talk to us about,” he said. “It’s not about tax structure. It’s about investments in education. It’s about making sure the workforce is here. I think we owe it to these companies that we’ve recruited here to make sure we continue to invest in education and training so we have the very best workforce.”
Cooper said he’s hopeful that the state’s next budget will include “significant investments in education from cradle to career.”
This story was produced with financial support from a coalition of partners led by Innovate Raleigh as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work. Learn more; go to bit.ly/newsinnovate.
This story was originally published August 3, 2021 at 11:50 AM with the headline "Pharma giant Amgen creating 350 jobs in Wake County after getting NC incentives."
