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Law360 (May 18, 2021, 6:00 PM EDT) -- Becton Dickinson and Co. is building a €165 million ($201.7 million) manufacturing facility in northeast Spain, according to an announcement Tuesday from the global medical tech firm.
BD said the facility, located in Zaragoza, will have 8,000 square meters (roughly 86,000 square feet) of space when the first buildout is complete, and the firm plans to start construction late this year.
Zaragoza is in Spain's Aragon region, and is 195 miles northeast of Madrid and 190 miles west of Barcelona.
"BD's new plant in Zaragoza will produce drug delivery devices, primarily for pharmaceutical companies that supply the European market with drugs in prefillable syringes such as vaccines and other biologic drugs," Eric Borin, worldwide president of BD Pharmaceutical Systems, said in a statement Tuesday. "This new plant will also add needed capacity to support major vaccination campaigns, such as the one currently taking place in response to the COVID-19 pandemic."
BD said the facility, its fourth manufacturing plant in Spain, will initially employ 150 workers and the company expects to expand the plant to have 30,000 square meters of space and employ 600 workers by 2030.
The investment in the facility is part of a broader expansion program on the part of BD. The firm in December 2020 announced it was investing $1.2 billion in manufacturing plants over the course of the next four years. The firm is expanding its prefillable syringes as well as advanced drug delivery systems capacities as part of that $1.2 billion investment program.
BD's expansion of its manufacturing footprint comes amid a surge in investment in life sciences real estate. Experts recently told Law360 they expect that sector to be attractive for some time.
BD has been doing production in Spain for four decades, and currently has plants in San Agustín de Guadalix, Fraga and Almaraz.
"After the December 2020 announcement of BD's intention to build a new plant in Europe, a detailed site location search process resulted in Zaragoza, Aragon, being selected because of the optimal conditions offered by the region, the synergies that could be produced with BD's Fraga facility and the results and excellent performance of the plants that currently exist in Spain," Lourdes López, general director of BD for Spain and Portugal, said in a statement Tuesday.
The firm manufactures COVID-19 vaccination injection equipment at the Fraga plant, and the three facilities in Spain have a combined 1,500 employees and manufacture 10 billion medical devices annually, BD said Tuesday. The company has 70,000 employees worldwide.
Counsel information for the latest matter in Zaragoza was not immediately available Tuesday.
--Editing by Stephen Berg.
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