State makes progress in biotech field

But North Carolina, Georgia’s most aggressive nearby competitor for pharmaceutical manufacturing, had more than five times as many workers employed in the industry in late 2011, according to its Department of Commerce. And California and New Jersey have thousands more pharmaceutical workers than North Carolina.

States compete doggedly to recruit pharmaceutical manufacturing and research facilities because they pay higher than average wages in the bioscience industry, where employees earn more than average factory workers, Bittenbinder said. The industry includes making surgical instruments, drugs and biofuels, as well as conducting genetic research.

State officials touted the news as an economic bank shot — bringing Georgia a big-payroll production plant while accelerating the state’s progress to become a major player in the industry.

Experts were skeptical about the latter goal. But as to the first, there was little doubt, said Rajeev Dhawan, director of the Economic Forecasting Center at Georgia State University.

“This is what I call high-tech manufacturing, which is even better than the durable goods kind,” he said.

Like the recent hoopla over a new Caterpillar plant planned near Athens, Baxter’s announcement promises thousands of jobs after the impact ripples through the local economy. And the Baxter jobs are likely to be more skilled, the wages higher and the plant’s future even brighter than the recently announced Caterpillar plant.

“Caterpillar’s future will be determined by world grain prices and China’s health, and this [Baxter plant] will be immune to that,” Dhawan said.

Baxter, which employs more than 48,000 workers worldwide with sales of $13.9 billion, declined to provide a breakdown of jobs or pay scales, saying it would employ a range of workers from high school graduates to people with advanced degrees.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics says that a biological technician in pharmaceutical manufacturing makes an average salary of $48,250 a year. An electrical technician earns $57,670, general maintenance workers get paid $47,670 and the average salary for a biomedical engineer is $89,860.

Phil Gibson, the program director at Gwinnett Technical College’s relatively new bioscience program, pushed by the state for just such an occasion, was consulted on setting up a training program for future Baxter workers.

The state will build a $14 million training center for Baxter, as part of a $78 million package of incentives that helped Georgia land the plant.

A high-tech plant will need a core of well-trained workers across the spectrum, such as mechanics, electricians, scientists with advanced degrees, lab technicians and workers that do more mundane tasks such as packing products for shipment.

“You will see a blend of very high-tech and also lower-tech jobs,” Gibson said. “Not only will you have to be able to work in a clean room, but you will have to be able to handle a wrench inside a clean room, too.” A clean room is a highly controlled environment that keeps out contaminants.

Ahmed Enany, president of the Southern California Biomedical Council, a trade group, said he would expect that half or more of the workers in such a plant would have a two-year or a college degree.

Baxter has a similar plant in the Los Angeles metropolitan area.

Georgia likely won this plant because of the anticipated lower costs, partially brought down by the incentive and training package Baxter was offered.

“You have to look on this the way you look at manufacturing,” said Mark Sweeney, senior principal in McCallum Sweeney Consulting, a site selection company in South Carolina. And that means that cost — of land, labor, electricity — is paramount, he said.

Production that is cutting-edge often needs to be closer to labs, schools or hospitals.

But Baxter already knows what it will do in this facility, so that kind of proximity isn’t needed, said biotech analyst Judson Clark of Edward Jones & Co.

“They can make this wherever they want to,” he said. The choice of Social Circle “doesn’t exactly scream ‘high-tech corridor.’”

‘Employment generator’

During the past several decades, manufacturing’s impact has diminished in Georgia, as the sector has shrunk to less than 10 percent of the state’s workforce. But many of the jobs lost were lower-pay, lower-skilled positions in industries such as textile and apparel.

Hope for manufacturing in the state has of late shifted up the value chain to work that is less easily transferred to cheap labor overseas.

“Both this and Caterpillar have less of a chance of being outsourced,” Dhawan said.

But because the Baxter plant is toward the end of the supply chain, not the beginning, it is not likely to spawn a biotech cluster of companies here, including both R&D and production firms, said Steven Casper, professor at the Keck Graduate Institute in Claremont, Calif., which trains bioscience professionals.

But Casper praised the Baxter plant as “a great employment generator.” Because of its size, the plant offers the state an opportunity to ratchet up training and education to attract similar production facilities.

“The key is to make this plant an anchor so other companies want to locate in the area, to share in the labor market,” Casper said. “Once Baxter is there, it will be a whole lot easier for the next company.”

Casper compared the plant’s pick of a sparsely populated area to the decision by Amgen, now a huge biotech company, to build a similar plant in Thousand Oaks, Calif. “Thousand Oaks is a [long] drive to Los Angeles. When they first located ... there was nothing there.”

Now, Baxter has a plant in Thousand Oaks, too, he said.

Baxter will break ground in Georgia this year, and the plant is expected to be fully operational by 2018.

Plasma will be collected at a number of centers to be established in the region where people can sell the bodily fluid. The process typically involves giving a pint of blood, having the plasma removed from the blood, and then the patient has the red blood cells put back into the body.

The plant will break the plasma down and process it into medicines and medical liquids.

Company spokesman Brian Kyhos said the new plant when completed will the largest and most integrated of the company’s three U.S. facilities that process plasma into medical products.

Its Los Angeles facility is currently the world’s largest provider of plasma-derived therapies, employing more than 1,200, according to company information.

It can process more than 3.2 million liters of plasma per year and processes approximately 60 percent of the total plasma volume manufactured by Baxter.

Kyhos said the Georgia facility will be the company’s first U.S. vertically integrated plant, where plasma is taken in and processed and packaged into medical products ready for distribution.

“Those other facilities, they all do a portion of the overall work toward making final products,” said company spokesman Brian Kyhos. “The new facility will be able to do all of those steps.”

The company has purchased more land than it needs so that it could expand the facility at a later date, he said.