October 17, 2016
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
On Thursday, October 13, Pfizer held its annual Manufacturing Day event in Portage, Michigan. Along with that event, which provided access to its personnel and manufacturing facility to 10 engineering and science students from Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo College and Kalamazoo Valley Community College, the company released a report analyzing its financial impact on the state.
The study was published by the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. The Upjohn Institute is a private, nonprofit, nonpartisan, independent research organization focused on researching the causes and effects of unemployment.
The study found that the company’s manufacturing facility impacts Kalamazoo and Van Buren counties to the tune of about $2.2 billion.
“While Pfizer employs 2,202 colleagues (workers),” said James Robey, director of Regional Economic Planning Services for the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, in a statement, “its activities also support more than an estimated 1,200 supplier jobs.”
According to the report, “The activities of the direct and indirect jobs, support more than 1,600 jobs supplying good and services to workers. Additionally, 631 government jobs are supported by Pfizer, and the economy (is) driven through the indirect and induced employment.” As per Robey, that amounts to about 5,680 jobs.
Currently, Pfizer is investing $41 million to add a 98,000-square-foot warehouse space onto its main manufacturing building, Pfizer Building No. 41. In addition to six truck docks, it will have 12,000 pallet spaces for raw materials, and other product supplies and finished goods. That project is expected to be completed in 2017.
The Upjohn Institute projected that the construction project will create about 449 jobs and dump about $51 million into the region’s economy.
In addition, Pfizer is planning to build a new manufacturing site to make its Act-O-Vial, a portable device used by paramedics and other healthcare professionals to inject patients with inflammation and allergy treatment, Solu-Medrol. The construction there is expected to cost $105.7 million.
The company’s manufacturing complex in Portage, a suburb of Kalamazoo, Michigan, is Pfizer’s largest. It has 124 buildings on 1,200 acres. The buildings total more than 4 million square feet. The company has 63 manufacturing sites worldwide.
Ropbert Betzig, interim site leader of Kalamazoo Operations for Pfizer Global Supply, told MLive, “We don’t all make the same things. What we tend to make here at our site is the more difficult type of products. The APIs (active pharmaceutical ingredients) that we make, some of those are 16 steps long.”
A previous economic analysis of Pfizer on Michigan’s economy was published in 2009, which at that time cited an impact of about $767.5 million. It’s not a direct comparison to the most recent report, because some of the parameters were different. In addition, Pfizer’s animal health unit was spun off to become Zoetis in 2013.
However, the period was turbulent for local manufacturing. “From 2003 to 2008,” Betzig told MLive, “we lost about half of our (production) volume. So we were about half utilized. We used to package solid orals (tablets and capsules) here. That got moved down to Puerto Rico. … And as those things were moving out, we were selling less of our injectable products in the marketplace.”
The Portage manufacturing facilities nonetheless produce a wide range of products, including sterile injectables, liquids and semi-solids, powders, gelfoam/gelfilm products, and APIs.
