With potential passage of the BIOSECURE Act looming and WuXi Biologics seeing its share price and profits decline, the Chinese biopharma contract manufacturing giant is responding with a sizable divestiture.
In Ireland, WuXi Biologics has sold a new vaccines plant to Merck & Co. for €500 million ($521 million). The New Jersey company was a natural buyer of the facility as it was the lone client WuXi Biologics served at the site in Dundalk, executing a 20-year contract to produce vaccines worth $150 million annually.
Ireland’s Foreign Direct Investment Agency (IDA) and Merck’s MSD Ireland unit revealed the sale Monday. The companies expect to complete the transaction in the first half of this year. The facility, which currently employs 200, will house an additional 150 workers by the end of this year, according to the IDA.
In 2019, WuXi Biologics announced that it was investing €200 million to build the plant, which handles both substance and product manufacturing.
The three-story vaccine facility covers 15,520 square meters (167,000 square feet) and becomes Merck’s eighth installation in Ireland, including five manufacturing sites. Merck has another vaccine plant in Carlow, Ireland, but the Dundalk facility will be the only one that can produce live virus vaccines.
The BIOSECURE Act, which was passed by a 306-81 vote in the U.S. House of Representatives in September, seeks to block handful of Chinese firms—including WuXi Biologics—from obtaining federal contracts and working with biopharma firms that hold such contracts.
WuXi Biologics' plant sale comes after the Financial Times in October reported that the company and WuXi AppTec were weighing certain divestitures amid the BIOSECURE threat.
Last month, WuXi AppTec sold the U.S. and U.K. operations of its Advanced Therapies Unit to New York private investment firm Altaris.
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