March 23, 2015
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
Shanghai, China-based UniTao announced Friday that it was stalling its drug operations in Petersburg, Va. UniTao is a subsidiary of Tenry Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd.
In October 2014 the company announced it planned to buy a Boehringer Ingelheim Chemicals Inc. facility for $22.5 million. It is located on 180 acres near Interstate 95 in Virginia. UniTao indicated it expected to eventually hire 376 people to work at the plant.
Tenry Pharmaceuticals, the umbrella company, was founded in 2005. It focuses on research and development, manufacturing and commercialization of drugs, as well as active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), dietary supplements and food additives. It employs 500 people and has five subsidiaries, of which UniTao is one.
“Our expansion to Virginia underscores our commitment to meeting the demands of our global customers as efficiently as possible,” said Tao Ye, chief executive officer of UniTao in a statement in October. “The former Boehringer Ingelheim facility, the region’s accessibility and its skilled workforce will enable us to start operations quickly and better meet marketplace demands in the U.S. and elsewhere.”
Part of the company’s move to Virginia was $1 million in incentive grants from the Governor’s Opportunity Fund. That state grant would be met by matching grants or incentives from the city of Petersburg. To date the grants have not been distributed and a spokeswoman, Suzanne Clark, for the Virginia Economic Development Partnership stated on Friday that they would not be disbursed until UniTao met its investment and job creation requirements.
The news “clearly is disappointing and will have a significant impact on their current employees and the region,” said Clark in a statement. “They notified us that this represents a temporary pause and their vision for the facility has not changed. We are remaining optimistic that this is just temporary and that when conditions improve, they will move forward with the plans they announced.”
Currently about 30 people work at the facility. The company’s statement indicated that “impacted employees will receive a severance package for their brief service to the company.”
The company’s statement indicates it is waiting for business conditions to improve.
In related news, Petersburg announced that the Shandong Tranlin Paper Co. will hire 2,000 by 2020 people in Chesterfield County to produce environmentally-friendly paper products. “The Tri-Cities, for a lot of projects, is a great place,” said Roy Dahlquist, managing director for Asia at the Virginia Economic Development Partnership in a statement. VEDP acts as a match-maker for companies interested in setting up shop in Virginia.
