UCB has broken ground symbolically on its first US manufacturing site. At a ceremony in Gwinnett County, Georgia on October 12, the Belgian drugmaker dedicated its future biologics campus at Rowen, a mixed use innovation district, unveiling Emmanuel Janssen Circle at the campus entrance, named for the company’s founder. Georgia, US Commerce Department and county officials attended alongside UCB leadership.
The numbers were first announced earlier this year and were restated, not increased, at the ceremony: an investment of approximately $2 billion, about 330 highly skilled permanent jobs, more than 1,000 construction jobs, and an estimated $5 billion in economic impact. The site is planned at about 460,000 square feet on nearly 80 acres and is the largest manufacturing investment in UCB’s history. More than 400 of its roughly 2,000 US employees are already based at its metro Atlanta headquarters, established in 1993.
The strategic setting is the agreement UCB reached with the US government in August, under which it committed to a more balanced pricing approach for future launches, participation in the GENEROUS program and continued onshore manufacturing, and in return is not subject to Section 232 pharmaceutical tariffs or future pricing mandates on current products. The Georgia plant is the physical half of that bargain.
UCB is not alone. The ceremony lands in a year when European and US drugmakers have announced a sequence of US biologics plants, and it contrasts with yesterday’s caution against double counting: this is a dedication of an already announced investment, evidence the project is proceeding, not a new $2 billion of sector capital expenditure.