Triangle Business Journal by Jason deBruyn, Staff Writer
Pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co. Inc. announced a $15 million investment in two projects at its Wilson facility on Wednesday.
In one project, Merck (NYSE: MRK) will renovate manufacturing space and in another project it will build a new cold storage facility for vaccine packaging to support the company’s growing vaccines business. Both projects are scheduled to finish in the next year.
Currently, the majority of products packaged in Wilson are stored at room temperature. Vaccines are refrigerated or frozen and require cold storage and expansive storage space.
Merck’s Wilson site employs roughly 400 people. The facility improvements will not directly add new jobs this year; however, the construction process managed by Jacobs Engineering may bring temporary construction job opportunities to the site, says Merck.
Merck’s Wilson campus covers 225 acres and the Packaging and Stability Testing facility serves as a packaging center for many of the company’s pharmaceutical products for the U.S. and Canadian markets. It opened in June 1983 and began operating in August of that year. Based in New Jersey, Merck also operates a vaccine manufacturing facility in Durham.
For the first quarter of 2012, Merck reported $11.7 billion in sales and $1.7 billion in net income; both figures were increases from the same quarter in 2011.
