French pharmaceutical company Sanofi has confirmed that it plans to invest €1.3 billion ($1.4 billion) in building a state-of-the-art insulin production facility at its site near Frankfurt in western Germany.
The new factory, covering an area of around 36,000 square metres – about the size of five football pitches – will replace an earlier production facility on the site and is expected to employ hundreds of specialists by 2029, the company said.
“We are confirming our commitment to diabetes patients worldwide and are leveraging the many years of expertise of our BioCampus in Frankfurt and its highly qualified employees,” said Brendan O’Callaghan, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Sanofi in Germany.
Sanofi’s investment is 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 declined to provide information on how much taxpayer money will be used to build the facility, saying it would depend on Brussels state aid procedures.
A spokeswoman for the Hessian Ministry of Economic Affairs explained that the state governments and the federal government are currently examining the possibility of financing.
The plans were tentatively announced in early July, but not yet confirmed. The Frankfurt-Höchst site is one of Sanofi’s largest factories, with around 6,600 employees. It produces the long-standing diabetes drug Lantus.
The Paris-based company employs more than 86,000 people worldwide. Sanofi was recently reported to have considered moving insulin production to France.
Several foreign pharmaceutical companies have recently pledged major investments in Germany. For example, the American pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly is investing €2.3 billion in the construction of a production facility in the western state of Rhineland-Palatinate.
