California-based Amgen announced on April 25 that it will invest $900 million to expand its Central Ohio manufacturing facility in New Albany, bringing the total number of jobs created to 750 and the total investment in the Columbus region to over $1.4 billion.
“Amgen has been a leading U.S.-based manufacturer of biologic medicines since 1988. Today’s investment reinforces our ongoing commitment to expanding U.S. manufacturing and ensuring patients around the world have access to our innovative medicines,” said Robert A. Bradway, chairman and CEO at Amgen. “Ohio offers a supportive business climate, skilled workforce and strategic location, making it an ideal choice for this next phase of our investment.”
Amgen, which has a market cap of $154 billion, entered Ohio in June 2021, when the Thousand Oaks-headquartered firm announced plans to invest in a biomanufacturing plant in Central Ohio. The investment marked the company’s expansion into the Columbus region, enhancing its U.S. manufacturing capabilities and creating 400 jobs.
Sandra Rodriguez-Toledo, vice president of site operations for Amgen, said, “Our decision to expand in the Columbus Region reflects the area’s robust infrastructure, skilled workforce and supportive business environment. We are committed to being a long-term partner in this community and look forward to advancing our mission of serving patients worldwide from our New Albany facilities.” The move comes as Amgen also embarks on a $650 million, 750-job expansion of its plant in Juncos, Puerto Rico.
In a September 19 interview with Rodriguez-Toledo, we learned more about the site selection process that led Amgen to select Ohio not once but twice for expansions that ultimately will support an annual payroll of $75 million in the Buckeye State.
When we asked Rodriguez-Toledo why Amgen originally picked a site in the 12,000-acre New Albany International Business Park, she said, “We selected Ohio in 2021 for several factors. Different places in the U.S. were considered, but Ohio made the most sense for Amgen. The land in New Albany was ready to start construction, and since we had a need to have the operation up and running in 26 months, the deal happened. Secondly, the site in terms of how it is located for distribution centers was perfect. Thirdly, the diversity of the workforce and partnerships with universities to supply workers were critical.”
From 13 States to 1 Winner
A broad search covered 13 states, according to Rodriguez-Toledo, before the one in Central Ohio emerged at the winner. Incentives sealed the deal. “The incentives that are more related to the workforce are very helpful. Those incentives will go toward training the workers that we are going to hire,” she added.
On that count, Rodriguez-Toledo said the hiring process has begun. “We have already started the hiring process for those technical positions and the leadership in order to be ready to continue recruiting. Heads of all functional areas have already been recruited, as well as the more technical jobs for construction,” she said. “We will continue to do that next year to be ready for full operations to commence in 2028. We are doing curriculums for these job training programs through our partnerships with Columbus State University and The Ohio State University.”
Jennifer Chrysler, community development director for the New Albany, located in Franklin and Licking counties, called the Amgen deal “one of the most exciting projects we have worked on in the city.”
Several factors made Amgen take notice of New Albany, she says. “We have been the home of the international headquarters of Abercrombie & Fitch since 2005. We worked with One Columbus and JobsOhio to see how we could diversify our base of industry and use our assets to attract other companies,” she says. “When manufacturing came back to the state of Ohio, we were ready to take advantage of that trend. That is how the supply chain for the personal care and beauty sector came to locate here.”
“Given our accelerated timeline, it has been remarkable to see how we have been able to make the impossible possible.”
— Sandra Rodriguez-Toledo, Vice President of Site Operations, Amgen
The city even has a name for this place: the New Albany Personal Care and Beauty Campus. Today, that campus has 11 companies, 1.4 million sq. ft., 1,500 jobs, $144 million in cumulative investment, $28 million in infrastructure, and a temp agency for cross-training. Not bad for a community that up until 2010 was so small that it was known as a village. The 2010 Census changed that and promoted New Albany to city status.
“We understand speed to market. We started to earn a name for ourselves nationally,” says Chrysler. “That is how we managed to get on the radar screen for Amgen. The beauty park rose up and attracted them. Amgen quickly started to investigate what made the beauty park so successful. We had our first visit with them in the middle of the pandemic. We had to caravan in a string of 12 cars because we could not all ride together. We shared our strategic plan with them. They saw very quickly that we do what we say we are going to do. When we showed them how to go from concept to a shovel in the ground, that is how we positioned ourselves for the first announcement.”
Photos courtesy of Amgen
“We understand speed to market. We started to earn a name for ourselves nationally. That is how we managed to get on the radar screen for Amgen.”
— Jennifer Chrysler, Community Development Director, New Albany, Ohio
Over $60 Billion in 17 Years
But that was just the beginning, says Chrysler. “The second announcement is the one that excites me the most. It is one thing to convince a company to come here and build and grow, but the proof is in the pudding when a company makes the second announcement, and it is even bigger than the first one,” she says. “They are choosing you after having that initial experience to grow and build even more the second time. The first project was commissioned and went up faster than any other building in their portfolio. That made a huge impression on Amgen.”
Tyler Allchin, managing director of health care and life sciences for JobsOhio, says that the Team Ohio approach also made a big impression on Amgen. “We often refer to our approach as Team Ohio. That team played a role in Amgen bringing their site from shovel in the ground to product to market in 26 months. They had never brought a project online that quickly,” he says. “That speaks to our obsession with speed to market and pace of business. Pharma companies are very demanding on timelines and getting their products out. We do our best to de-risk that process and help them run ahead of schedule. We pride ourselves on speeding them up and not slowing them down with any bureaucracy.”
Allchin cited other location factors as pivotal: “The short commute to the airport at John Glenn, and the short drive to the cargo airport at Rickenbacker, which has cold storage capability for life science companies, were also key factors,” he adds. “But the ability to attract and retain skilled workers is still the No. 1 criterion for companies when deciding where to place these facilities. The OSU biomedical engineering, chemistry and biology programs are critical.”
Seeds Planted in 1996
Bill Ebbing, president and CEO of the New Albany Company, says that “we may have won Amgen in 2021, but we started the prospect of getting Amgen back in 1996 when we started the business park. We knew what we wanted to create right from the start.”
Ebbing says the development began as a 1,200-acre business park that would ultimately grow to over 12,000 acres today. “We did master-planning of the park with the city. Bringing the right infrastructure into place and having the right community focused on workforce and quality of life were essential to making this development a success,” he says. “When you think about the assets that are being constructed and the cost of those assets, it is a huge investment. Having the right platform is critical. That is how the Amgen project began. It is because of that forward thinking in 1996.”
Today, Amgen takes up 225 acres in the park and has plenty of company in New Albany. Since 2008, the city and the park have attracted over $60 billion in private investment, with $28 billion coming in the form of Intel’s huge semiconductor manufacturing announcement in January 2022. By the end of next year, over 30,000 people will be employed in the park, and at any given time, there is an average of 4,000 construction workers employed on site in the development.
Reflecting on the growth of both Amgen and New Albany, Rodriguez-Toledo said, “It has been an honor and a privilege to be here in Ohio. Given our accelerated timeline, it has been remarkable to see how we have been able to make the impossible possible. It was a very aggressive timeline to build building one, and now we are ready to move on to the next phase of our expansion in Ohio.”
Matt McCollister, interim president of One Columbus, says the region will continue to support the growth of Amgen and other life science firms through enhanced worker training that will take place at the new Biomanufacturing Workforce Center of Excellence that was announced in mid-September.
“That will have a huge impact on our region,” he says. “Only two other places in America graduate more life science people than we do — Boston and Philadelphia. We probably lose some of our graduates to other locations because we produce so much talent. We’re also working with partners like Columbus State University on intensive training for entry-level technicians to work in clean rooms.”
According to One Columbus, from Q1 of 2021 through Q3 of 2025, the region had over 2,500 new jobs announced in life sciences. Calling this milestone “truly unbelievable,” McCollister added: “We’ve had a heck of run, and now we’re preparing for more.”
Photo: Getty Images
