The French pharmaceutical company Sanofi has confirmed that it aims to invest €1.3 billion ($1.4 billion) in the construction of a modern insulin production facility at its site near Frankfurt in western Germany.
The new plant, with an area of around 36,000 square metres – around five football pitches – will replace a previous production facility on the site. Several hundred specialists are expected to be working there by 2029, the company said.
“We are reaffirming our commitment to diabetes patients worldwide and utilizing the many years of expertise at our Frankfurt BioCampus with its highly qualified employees,” said Brendan O’Callaghan, chairman of the Supervisory Board of Sanofi in Germany.
Sanofi’s investment is being made possible by the support of the German federal government, the state government in Hesse, where Frankfurt is located and the city of Frankfurt. It is still subject to approval by the European Commission in the EU state aid procedure.
The company did not want to provide any information on how much taxpayers’ money will be used to build the facility. This would depend on the Brussels state aid proceedings.
A spokeswoman for the Hessian Economics Ministry explained that the state and federal governments are currently examining the possibility of funding.
The plans were provisionally announced at the beginning of July, but had not yet been confirmed. The Frankfurt-Höchst site is one of Sanofi’s largest plants with around 6,600 employees. It produces the long-established diabetes drug Lantus.
More than 86,000 people work for the Paris-based company worldwide. Most recently, Sanofi is said to have considered relocating insulin production to France.
Several foreign pharmaceutical companies have recently pledged large investments in Germany. The US pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, for example, is investing €2.3 billion in the construction of a production facility in the western state of Rhineland-Palatinate.
