Novo Nordisk has announced plans to invest DKK 8.5 billion ($1.2 billion) to establish a new production facility in Odense, Denmark. The company made the announcement last month (December 16, 2024). 

The new site will feature a finished production facility and warehouse spanning over 40,000 square meters. Designed to be modular and flexible, it will accommodate multiple product types for treating rare diseases, such as hemophilia. 

Construction work has begun, and the facility is scheduled to be completed in 2027. The investment is expected to create 400 permanent jobs upon completion of the facility.  

The new facility represents the first new production site in Denmark for the company this century and follows an announcement last month (December 2024) of a large-scale investment in Denmark for upgrading its quality control operations. The company plans to invest DKK 2.9 billion ($411 million) to establish a quality control laboratory at the company’s site in Hillerød, Denmark. The new facility, covering 53,000 square meters, will be the company’s largest investment in advanced quality control to date (as reported in December 2024). The new laboratory will serve as a central hub for quality control operations in Denmark, consolidating existing locations into a single facility. It is designed to comply with the demands of current and future GMP and will be able to support future capacity expansions.   

Novo Nordisk’s global manufacturing network has strategic production sites in Denmark, the US, France, Brazil, and China. All Novo Nordisk’s medicines are manufactured at these sites and subsequently distributed globally. The products manufactured include insulin products, glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) agonists for the treatment of diabetes and obesity, and medicines to treat rare diseases, such as hemophilia and growth disorders. In all, Novo Nordisk’s manufacturing unit has more than 25,000 employees.  

Its investments in Denmark cap off a series of manufacturing expansions announced by the company in 2024. The largest was through acquisition with the $16.5-billion acquisition of the CDMO, Catalent, by the company’s parent company, Novo Holdings, which subsequently sold to Novo Nordisk three fill–finish sites and related assets in Anagni, Italy, Bloomington, Indiana, and Brussels, Belgium. Those deals closed last month (December 2024), and the Catalent acquisition is expected to gradually increase Novo Nordisk’s filling capacity from 2026 and onwards. 

In addition, in June (June 2024), Novo Nordisk announced plans to invest $4.1 billion to build a second fill–finish manufacturing facility at its site in Clayton, North Carolina. As one of the largest manufacturing investments in Novo Nordisk’s history, the expansion will add 1.4 million square feet of production space for aseptic manufacturing and finished production processes, doubling the combined square footage of all three of the company’s existing facilities in North Carolina. Construction will gradually be finalized between 2027 and 2029.  

Also, last month (December 2024), Novo Nordisk agreed to acquire from Novavax, a Gaithersburg, Maryland-based vaccines company, a manufacturing facility and related assets in Bohumil, Czech Republic, for $200 million. The agreement includes a transfer of assets, including a 150,000-square-foot recombinant protein manufacturing facility with support buildings, along with the existing workforce and all related and required infrastructure. 

Source: Novo Nordisk