The Japanese AGC will invest 90 million and create 100 jobs in Malgrat de Mar

The Japanese chemical-pharmaceutical company AGC Pharma Chemicals will invest 90 million euros and create 100 skilled jobs with the expansion of the company's factory located in Malgrat de Mar, where 330 people work. The group is one of the main suppliers to the pharmaceutical industry from the Malgrat plant, specialized in the production of active pharmaceutical ingredients or substances that can eventually be converted into a medicine, technically called APIs (Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients). It is abouta market that grows at a rate of 7% annually, to which AGC wants to respond, focusing on its mission: to improve people's lives by providing better quality products, as the company has specified. The remodeling of the Catalan factory responds tothe need to increase production capacity by 30%, with the construction of a new 7,500 square meter plant, which will become operational in 2024. The expansion will be used to incorporate the latest technological advances in the sector, according to Akihiro Kadokura, CEO of AGC Pharma Chemicals Europe, the European division of the group based in Japan. The head of the company stressed, during the presentation of the project, thatCatalonia is a strategic center for the chemical and pharmaceutical industryand that "it has professional talent specialized in this field."The new facilities will have reactors between 1.5 and 7.5 m3 to produce a greater volume of active pharmaceutical ingredientsand additional space for future investments of the group in the Malgrat de Mar plant, which is the production unit in Europe for its international division of synthetic active pharmaceutical ingredients. The company has been present in Catalonia since2019, the year in which it acquired Malgrat Pharma Chemicals, from the German pharmaceutical group Boehringer Ingelheimand continued with production and guaranteed more than 300 jobs. The German pharmaceutical company remains one of AGC's main clients to supply the factory that Boehringer has in Sant Cugat del Vallès. Since then, in Malgrat,the Japanese manufacturer has activated an R&D center that it plans to strengthen and that allows the development of processes from laboratory scale to commercial production. Likewise, research work improves the range of services offered to all customers of active pharmaceutical ingredients.

The AGC group is an international business conglomerate that comprises more than 200 companies, with a presence in more than 30 countries, with more than 55,000 workers and a sales volume exceeding 12,700 million euros, with data from 2020.

During the presentation of the project, which has the support of the agency for business competitiveness Acció, the Minister of Business and Labor, Roger Torrent, valued the Japanese group's commitment to Catalonia because it contributes to "positioning it globally in the pharmaceutical sector", a "strategic and key" area that "will be even more so in the future".