ÜPaul Hudson can only marvel at the Frankfurters. The Sanofi boss had just visited his company’s production line in the Höchst industrial park, where Biontech’s corona vaccine, for example, is filled. In order to become as efficient as possible, employees there strapped cameras to their chests to record every single work step and to see afterwards how things could be done even faster. “They always want to improve and they manage to do it,” praises the Sanofi CEO. The people of Frankfurt will be happy to hear such an appreciation.
So far, Hudson, who was present at Industriepark Höchst for the first time in three years last week and spoke to parts of the workforce during an internal live stream, has triggered rather mixed emotions among the people of Frankfurt. At the end of 2019, a few months after taking office, he announced the end of diabetes research in Frankfurt. The insulin drug Lantus is by far Sanofi’s most important product in the industrial park.
50 million for research
And only recently he outsourced the production of active pharmaceutical ingredients to a new subsidiary called Euroapi, which has reduced the number of employees at the Frankfurt site by more than 700. But the French group Sanofi, which is the largest successor to Hoechst AG in Frankfurt via the intermediate step Aventis and has around 7,700 employees across Germany, wants to hold on to its largest location, as Hudson emphasized during his visit: The company will be 85 million this year Investing euros in production capacity in Höchst, including the so-called Flex-Line.
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Another 50 million euros flowed into research, including the so-called microbiopattform, with the help of which new drugs could be developed and manufactured. In addition, insulin will continue to be produced in Frankfurt for the foreseeable future. He sees no reason to stop production. The fact that the research was ended was due to the fact that there had been no significant progress in this area.
The demand for the drug Lantus – and thus its production – will increase worldwide. Even if returns are falling and other means are more profitable for the group, it is still worth producing. “Insulin continues to be an essential drug,” says Hudson. Although Sanofi no longer earns six billion euros a year with Lantus, it is still 2.5 billion euros. Lantus is thus still one of the Group’s three most important sources of revenue.
Service provider for Biontech
In recent years, Sanofi has invested between 165 million and 191 million euros in Frankfurt every year, most of it in drug production and manufacturing and a tenth in research. In the past two corona years, for example, the group converted a former insulin filling line for the mRNA-based corona vaccine. Sanofi originally wanted to fill its own product in Höchst, but since its development had to be abandoned, the company is now a service provider for Biontech.
In Frankfurt, the group is now working on connecting existing buildings in the southern part of the industrial park to form a “Center of Expertise”. According to Sanofi, all activities related to microbially manufactured products are to be summarized there. A spokeswoman said that this would establish an “end-to-end organization for the industrialization and market launch of this strategic product portfolio”. “With regard to the Sanofi pipeline, this is great news for Frankfurt, because here we have the opportunity to build up strategic expertise in a growth area.”
Sanofi at the industrial park is in the process of transforming from an insulin site into a bio-campus, Hudson says, including oncology and immunology. Some areas would shrink and others would grow. A pharmaceutical company is measured by what it has in the research pipeline. But Frankfurt doesn’t have to worry about its future: In the Höchst industrial park, the group spends more than ten times as much on research and development as other pharmaceutical companies, the CEO explained. “And we’re not doing this for charity, but because the Frankfurt researchers are great.”
