November 12, 2015
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
BASEL, Switzerland – Roche will vacate four manufacturing sites in the United States and Europe, displacing approximately 1,200 employees as part of a restructuring effort for the manufacturing of its small molecule products, the company announced Thursday.
The move comes as Swiss-based Roche addresses what it called the “underutilization” of its portfolio of medicines. Roche said the affected sites are in Florence, S.C. in the United States, Clarecastle in Ireland, Leganes in Spain and Segrate in Italy. In order to evade job loss, Roche said it will look for divestment opportunities, as opposed to immediately planning to close the sites. Roche said the restructuring effort will begin in 2016 and continue through 2021.
“With these changes we are responding to the evolution of our small molecule portfolio towards specialized medicines produced in lower volumes,” Daniel O’Day, Chief Operating Officer, Pharmaceuticals Division of Roche, said in a statement. “We are aware of the impact this decision has on our colleagues, and we will do our utmost to support them during this transition.”
The Florence, S.C. facility 300,000 square feet of production space includes reactors ranging from 50 - 11,000 liters producing multiple products simultaneously, according to the Roche Carolina website.
Roche estimated closing these four sites will result in non-core restructuring costs of $1.6 billion, of which $600 million will be in cash.
But, while the company was announcing the four planned closings, Roche said it has plans of investing $300 million into a dedicated facility in Kaiseraugst, Switzerland to “support future technology requirements.” This investment will strengthen the company’s development and launch capabilities, Roche said.
Company stock did not seem to be negatively impacted when the news was released Thursday. Stock was up slightly, trading at $33.34 per share, however that is down from its 52-week high of $38.54 per share.
Earlier this month Roche announced it will invest $136 million to build a Roche Pharma Innovation Center in Shanghai’s Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Park. The new 14,000 square-foot innovation center will facilitate collaboration efforts between Roche and local research entities. The site will have space for 220 modular work areas. Roche plans to make Shanghai its third major R&D center, along with Basel and San Francisco.
Roche is in the process of presenting data about three highly anticipated drugs to treat multiple sclerosis, cancer and hemophilia. The highly anticipated drugs ocrelizumab for MS, atezolizumab for cancer, and ACE-910 for hemophilia, have the potential for combined sales of $5 billion, according to a Thomson Reuters Cortellis forecast. The breakdown for that would be $1.051 billion for ocrelizumab, $3.188 billion for atezolziumab, and $721 million for ACE-910.
