Life Sciences Industry Review, sidebar, Site Selection magazine, March 2003

Florida's Med-Tech
Gets a Booster

When Schott Pharmaceutical wanted to build a 173,000-sq.-ft. (16,070-sq.-m.) manufacturing facility and employ 120 highly paid workers, Pennsylvania won the deal by offering the company US$4.7 million in incentives.
Florida was in the running for the plant, but ultimately lost the deal because the Sunshine State couldn't compete with what the Keystone State had to offer.
Now it can. Thanks to a special designation conferred by Gov. Jeb Bush in October, Florida's biomedical technology firms are now eligible to receive capital investment tax credits and high-impact performance incentives if they create enough jobs.
"The biomedical technology industry is one of the most viable, rapidly growing industry sectors in the world, and Florida already has a place at the table," Bush said during the recent BioFlorida Conference in Fort Lauderdale. "The new designation will elevate our ability to attract, retain and grow this industry and continue to create high-wage, high-value jobs for Floridians."
Nowhere is that more evident than in Pinellas County on Florida's Gulf Coast. The Tampa Bay Area ranks among the nation's five largest medical technology clusters, and Pinellas accounts for 70 percent of the 11,000 med-tech jobs in the region. Medical device manufacturing makes up the bulk of this cluster, employing more than 7,000 people in Pinellas.

A Bay Teeming With Talent

Throughout the region, some 371 med-tech companies combine for more than $3.2 billion in annual sales in everything from pharmaceuticals and electro-medical equipment to surgical instruments and custom computer programming.
Tucked between St. Petersburg and Clearwater, Largo boasts operations from Baxter Healthcare Corp. and Linvatec – which each employ more than 1,000 workers – and the corporate headquarters of Eckerd Drugs.
What makes Pinellas such a magnet for high-tech medical companies? Corporate executives in the area point to several factors: abundance of highly skilled workers in the Bay Area; access to high-quality research centers at the nearby University of South Florida and H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa; access to the USF Manufacturing Training and Education Center; the area's quality of life; and access to capital.
Moreover, the area is home to both the Florida Medical Manufacturers Consortium and the Gulf Coast Life Sciences Initiative. Pinellas, Florida's second smallest county in land area, has 3.8 high-tech companies per square mile. Plus, the state's new "High-Impact" Designation will only help.
"This puts Florida on a much more level playing field," says Steve Mayberry, senior vice president of business retention and recruitment for Enterprise Florida.

– Ron Starner