UK's NuPharm Laboratories to Close With Loss of 66 Jobs

October 7, 2016
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff

LONDON -- A little more than one year after it was acquired by Quantum Pharma, Deeside-based NuPharm Laboratories is shutting down and 66 employees will either be terminated or absorbed by its parent company.

NuPharm laboratories, located near the border between England and Wales, is closing its doors by the end of 2016 due to significant cash losses, the BBC reported this morning. In a statement released by Quantum, “NuPharm was ‘not capable of becoming an earnings enhancing business,’ and closure was the only option,” according to the BBC report. Before pulling the trigger on shuttering the manufacturer or pharmaceutical and healthcare products, Quantum said it sought other avenues to protect the business and its employees, but there were no other viable options, the BBC added.

In a statement Quantum’s board of directors said the closing of NuPharm will allow the company “to focus on its core profitable specials business which produces the platform for its Niche Pharmaceutical product growth.”

At this time, it is not known if all 66 positions will be eliminated or if the parent company will provide new opportunities for them elsewhere.

Quantum acquired NuPharm in July 2015 for about $13 million. At the time of the acquisition, Quantum said NuPharm completes the company’s strategic infrastructure plan. Quanutm said the acquisition also introduced batch manufacturing and licensed product manufacturing capability to the company. In 2014 NuPharm reported revenues of about $5 million.

NuPharm was an outsource manufacturer of solid and liquid dose small batch-made specials and niche licensed pharmaceutical products. Quantum snapped up NuPharm after the company reduced its manufacturing activities to a smaller range of lines following the result of a routine MHRA (the U.K.’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency) inspection, Quanutm said at the time of the purchase. That inspection resulted in limitations of what NuPharm could do—something from which the company was never able to recover. In its closure announcement, the Quantum board of directors said NuPharm continued to remain subject to MHRA limitations and had become not only a drain on financial resources of the company, but also of the time of its management team, U.K.-based The Leader reported.

At the time of the acquisition, Andrew Scaife, the former chief executive officer of Quantum, said the deal to snap up NuPharm “represents a further important and exciting milestone for the Group as it significantly accelerates its strategic growth plan, further strengthening the business for the medium and long term.”

“The addition of NuPharm to the Group will be earnings enhancing from early 2016 after a period of integration, operational and quality process improvements and system investment in the second half of this year,” Scaife said in a 2015 statement.

Scaife resigned from the company in July, citing family reasons.