Despite some contract manufacturing growing pains in the post-COVID era, MilliporeSigma, the U.S. and Canada life science arm of Germany’s Merck KGaA, continues to make a splash with big production moves this year.
MilliporeSigma is plugging 62 million euros (about $66.3 million) into the build-out of a new quality control building at its Darmstadt, Germany, headquarters. The facility will ultimately unite some 135 employees across several departments into a single space, the company said in a press release.
The nearly 10,000-square-meter (107,639-square-feet) building is expected to be complete by the middle of 2025 and forms part of a broader investment program in Darmstadt under which the company will devote roughly 1.5 billion euros ($1.6 billion) by the middle of the decade.
MilliporeSigma’s upcoming facility will feature regenerative energy generation and low-CO2 construction, the company added in its release. The site will also comply with special safety requirements for genetic engineering, biology labs and dust-free labs that require unique hygiene protocols.
MilliporeSigma describes its Darmstadt footprint as “one of the company’s most important research and development centers for life science technologies.” Over the next 10 years, the company expects roughly 20% of its life science business’s sales from new products to come from the German location.
MilliporeSigma has been on a manufacturing expansion roll this year.
In late May, the contract manufacturer boosted its presence in gene therapy production with a $600 million deal for Mirus Bio. Mirus—which is based in Madison, Wisconsin, and was formerly a subsidiary of Gamma Biosciences—develops and sells transfection reagents, which allow genetic material to be incorporated into cells. This process plays a pivotal role in the production of viral-vector-based gene therapies.
Prior to that, MilliporeSigma in March said it would invest 300 million euros ($326 million) into its new bioprocessing plant in Daejeon, South Korea, where the company expects to create 300 new jobs by the end of 2028. At the time, the project marked the CDMO’s biggest investment in the Asia-Pacific region to date.
Still, it hasn’t all been smooth sailing for MilliporeSigma in 2024. During Merck KGaA’s first-quarter earnings presentation, the company noted its CDMO unit had charted a 17% decline in sales to 157 million euros ($170 million), which it blamed on “unfavorable project phasing” and a streamlining of the supply chain of one of its customers.
At the time, the CEO of Merck KGaA’s life science unit, Matthias Heinzel, admitted that the company was experiencing a “substantial decline in our margin following the volume drop—losing the COVID sales which had a higher margin profile.” That said, the helmsman stressed that “sequentially, Q4 to Q1, we already see a margin improvement.”
He added that the company is seeing “more normal ordering patterns” from larger customers as well as shorter lead times.