Big pharma cutbacks benefit Greenville plant

A contract drug manufacturer in Greenville plans to add at least 50 jobs after doubling the size of its production plant.

Metrics, which has gone from four to more than 230 employees in the past 14 years, reported Tuesday that it has completed an $18 million expansion and is looking for chemists to broaden services to the pharmaceutical industry.

The expansion includes laboratories, packaging lines, a tablet press and warehouse space, boosting Metrics' production capacity to 1 billion tablets per year. It allows the company to not only supply small batches of drugs for clinical tests but also large amounts of medicine that are ready to be sold.

"It has been a long-time dream to offer a full array of services that allow clients to keep development and commercial manufacturing projects under our roof," Phil Hodges, Metrics' co-founder and president, said in a statement.

Struggling with rising competition from cheaper generic medicines, large drugmakers in past years have farmed out more and more of their development work to contractors such as Metrics to cut costs.

In the past year, cutbacks in the pharmaceutical industry have deepened. GlaxoSmithKline, a British drugmaker with operations in the Triangle, announced 160 layoffs at its Zebulon manufacturing plant since February. The plant, which makes pills and packages asthma drug Advair, has eliminated about 500 full-time, part-time and temporary jobs since 2007.

Metrics doesn't release its customer list or revenue. But the company has benefited from the outsourcing trends among large drugmakers, said Jeff Basham, the company's vice president of marketing and sales. Metrics also attracts business from an increasing number of biotech companies across the world that are saving their cash reserves by contracting out much of their drug development work.

Located less than two hours east of the Triangle, one of the hottest drug development hubs in the United States, Greenville is also home to a plant owned by a Dutch contract drug manufacturer. DSM Pharmaceuticals employs about 1,000 in Greenville.

Both employers are important for the region's future.

Incentives

In the past two years, Metrics hired more than 70 employees. The new jobs and the plant expansion prompted state and county officials to offer Metrics an estimated $1 million in tax credits and incentives in September 2006. So far, it has collected a little more than $450,000 of those incentives, some of which are tied to job creation and investment in machinery, according to the Department of Commerce and the Department of Revenue.

The company was not offered any incentives for its current job expansion, said Deborah Barnes, with the Department of Commerce.

Metrics pays average salaries of $52,500, nearly double the average wage in Pitt County.