Hospira closing US manufacturing plant
pharmafile | January 20, 2015 | News story | Manufacturing and Production, Sales and Marketing | Clayton, Hospira, Novo Nordisk, Vancomycin hydrochloride, illinois, manufacturing
US injectable drugs specialist Hospira is to close its Clayton plant in North Carolina affecting 250 workers.
Manufacturing of products made in Clayton will either be transferred to other facilities or other companies, or discontinued completely the firm has said.
The Hospira facility is part of a biotech-related manufacturing complex in Johnston County in the US that also includes operations run by Grifols, and Novo Nordisk.
Illinois-based Hospira decided to close the unit after ‘analysing the market needs’ for four products, and looking at how the Clayton plant fits in with its operations generally. The anticipated costs of modernising the plant were also cited as a leading cause for closure.
“The employees at the Clayton plant have made valuable contributions to the company and will continue to play important roles as we wind down operations in the coming months,” Matt Stober, Hospira’s senior vice president for operations says in the statement.
Hospira says the closing itself is set to cost around $37 million, including approximately $15 million for employee-related costs that cover severance, retention, and other employee related assistance and exit costs associated with the move.
Hospira was in fact formed when Abbot spun-off its hospital products division and is now the world’s largest provider of injectable generic pharma products and infusion therapy technologies.
It was at the receiving end of more bad news just a few months ago, when it had to issue a recall of one lot of its injectable vancomycin hydrochloride in the US due to ‘uncontrolled storage during transit’.
This was just another setback for a company which has had to answer many questions from the FDA about practices at its plants across the world over the last few years. In September 2014 it was issued with a warning letter by the regulator for failing to adequately investigate and correct discrepancies and failures in products made at its Australian facility.
But on this latest downturn Stober adds: “After a thorough evaluation of the site and the various products produced at this facility, we had to make this difficult decision. This action results from extensive analysis of the plant, careful assessment of market needs for the products manufactured there.”
Brett Wells
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