Kimberly-Clark spin-off Halyard Health picks Alpharetta for HQ

A medical products corporation plans to hire up to 200 employees in Alpharetta as it separates itself from its Fortune 500 parent company.

Halyard Health, currently known as Kimberly-Clark Health Care, will move its headquarters from Roswell to Alpharetta as part of the split, and hire new workers in several divisions, including finance, legal, research and compliance, Chairman and CEO Robert Abernathy told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It will be based at 5405 Windward Parkway.

Dallas-based Kimberly-Clark, maker of Huggies and Kleenex, announced in November it planned to spin-off its health care business into its own public company. But Kimberly-Clark officials at the time did not address the company’s future in metro Atlanta.

“We’re invested in the community. The community has supported us throughout the years (and the) risk of losing top talent was just too great” for the company to leave the region, Abernathy said. The health care division currently employs about 450 in metro Atlanta, and about 16,500 worldwide. It had net sales of $1.68 billion in 2013, according to a regulatory filing made public Tuesday.

State officials said Georgia has more than 400 life sciences companies, about half of which are associated with medical devices.

Subscribers and digital pass users can read more about this story here, on our premium website, www.myajc.com. A full story also will appear in the Wednesday print edition of the AJC.