Novo Nordisk Targets $4.1 Billion Expansion of US Manufacturing Capacity

Sean K - stock.adobe.com

On June 24, 2024, Novo Nordisk announced that it plans to invest $4.1 billion (approximately DKK27 billion) into building a second fill/finish manufacturing facility in Clayton, N.C. The expansion will grow the company’s ability to produce current and future injectable therapeutics for treating obesity and other serious chronic diseases. With this investment, Novo Nordisk boosts its current 2024 investments towards production to $6.8 billion, up from the previous year's investment of $3.9 billion (not including acquisitions), according to a company press release.

The $4.1 billion investment marks one of the largest manufacturing investments in the company’s history, according to the release. The expansion will add 1.4 million square feet of production space for aseptic manufacturing and finished production processes, which will double the combined square footage of the company’s three existing facilities in North Carolina. One thousand new jobs will be added to the nearly 2500-person workforce in that region. Construction of the new facility will be gradually finalized between 2027 and 2029.

“It took us a century to reach 40 million patients, but through this expansion and continued investment in our global production, we’re building Novo Nordisk’s ability to serve millions more people living with serious chronic diseases in the future,” said Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen, president and CEO of Novo Nordisk, in the press release. “This is yet another real signal of our efforts to scale up our production to meet the growing global need for our life-changing medicines and the patients of tomorrow.”

The facility will feature sustainable components, such as roof-top solar panels and innovative water strategies. The company’s goal is to obtain Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Gold certification, which is recognized as a standard of excellence in the construction of healthy, efficient, and carbon- and cost-saving green buildings, according to the press release.

“Clayton was the first manufacturing site for Novo Nordisk in the [United States], and this new, large-scale investment confirms the continued importance of our production facilities there as cornerstones of our company’s growth,” said Henrik Wulff, executive vice-president, Product Supply, Quality & IT, Novo Nordisk, in the release. “For decades, we have partnered to foster a well-trained, dedicated, and diverse local workforce in North Carolina. In Clayton and across our global manufacturing sites, we are driven by one purpose: to deliver more for the millions of people living with chronic diseases—and this facility will help us achieve just that.”

In addition to its expansion activities in the US, the company also has expansion in Europe underway. In November 2023, it announced a multi-billion dollar expansion to its existing production site in Chartres, France, where it plans to significantly increase capacity by adding aseptic production and finished production processes, as well as an extension of the site’s current laboratory for quality control (1). The investment includes capacity expansion for the company’s glucagon-like peptide-1 products. Construction at the Chartres site will gradually be finalized between 2026 and 2028.

Reference

1. Novo Nordisk. Novo Nordisk Invests More Than 16 Billion Danish Kroner in Expansion of Production Facilities in Chartres, France. Press Release, Nov. 23, 2023.

Source: Novo Nordisk