BD (Becton, Dickinson and Company), a leading global medical technology company, will build a €165 million ($200 million USD) high-tech manufacturing facility in the city of Zaragoza, located in the Aragon region of Spain, that will create up to 600 jobs by 2030.

BD plans to begin construction of the new plant in late 2021, and the new facility will be the fourth manufacturing plant for BD in Spain. The site will initially have a workforce of 150 people and encompass an area of 8,000 square meters (86,000 square feet). By 2030 it is expected to employ up to 600 people with an area of 30,000 square meters (323,000 square feet). The new facility will meet high sustainability and eco-efficiency standards, and it will be a fully digital site, incorporating the latest in intelligent and autonomous technologies, also knowns as Industry 4.0 solutions.

"BD's new plant in Zaragoza will produce drug delivery devices, primarily for pharmaceutical companies that supply the European market with drugs in pre-fillable syringes such as vaccines and other biologic drugs," said Eric Borin, worldwide president of BD Pharmaceutical Systems. "This new plant will also add needed capacity to support major vaccination campaigns, such as the one currently taking place in response to the COVID-19 pandemic."

The new site represents a portion of the $1.2 billion USD investment over four years that was announced in December 2020 to expand and upgrade manufacturing capacity and technology for pre-fillable syringes (PFS) and advanced drug delivery systems (ADDS) as part of BD's 2025 growth strategy. The new site also continues BD's commitment to Spain, where it started operations more than 40 years ago and currently has three production plants located in San Agustín de Guadalix, Fraga and Almaraz. These facilities produce a total of 10 billion medical devices each year and employ 1,500 people. The Fraga plant is a key production site for the manufacture of COVID-19 vaccination injection devices.

"After the December 2020 announcement of BD's intention to build a new plant in Europe, a detailed site location search process resulted in Zaragoza, Aragon being selected because of the optimal conditions offered by the region, the synergies that could be produced with BD's Fraga facility, and the results and excellent performance of the plants that currently exist in Spain," Lourdes López, general director of BD in Spain and Portugal, added.

The planned site in Zaragoza is subject to administration process completion.