When AbbVie ($ABBV) announced its plans for a $320 million bulk manufacturing facility in Singapore in February, it said it would be its first in Asia when it was ready to roll near the end of the decade. But the drugmaker has now picked up a smaller API plant in Singapore and it will be up and running in 2016.
The Chicago-area drugmaker said it has acquired a 120,000-square-foot API manufacturing facility in Singapore's Tuas Biomedical Park. It has some additional buildings and extra equipment as well as the contained API facility. A spokesperson could not be reached and the company did not say from whom it acquired the operations or what it spent.
This is in addition to the $320 million bulk API facility that the maker of Humira said it would build in Singapore. That plant will manufacture both small-molecule and biologic active ingredients for AbbVie's oncology and immunology pipeline. It is slated to have 250 people when it is up and running in 2019.
AbbVie's project was announced the same day that AstraZeneca ($AZN) said it would spend more than $200 million to add 40,000 square feet of manufacturing, lab and administrative space to its biologics manufacturing facility in Frederick, MD. The expansion project gets underway in December and should be complete in mid-2017. The project will add about 300 new jobs to the site, which is already the company's largest biologics manufacturing facility.
- here's the AbbVie release