August 22, 2016
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
ORLANDO – Nephron Pharma is doling out more pink slips as the company continues to prepare to move operations from Florida to South Carolina. The company is expected to cut up to 60 more positions, inching closer to 500 job cuts since October of last year.
The Orlando Sentinel reported the company is shedding jobs in Orlando, but is hiring 700 people for its South Carolina site. The latest 60 job cuts were discovered by the Sentinel in a WARN notice filed with the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity.
What the job cuts mean for Nephron’s Orlando operations remains unknown. The Sentinel said it attempted to reach out to company owner Lou Kennedy, but she was unavailable for comment. The paper could not find any other company employee able to provide comment. Last year, Kennedy said the company planned to keep a “core staff” in Orlando and “continue to run respiratory products and look for any other special products suited to the facility here.”
Nephron focuses on manufacturing generic respiratory drugs and contract manufacturing. It is also the only manufacturer of Racemic Epinephrine. In June, the company launched its new asthma treatment, Budesonide Inhalation Suspension, a generic version of AstraZeneca ’s Pulmicort Respules.
In January, the company filed a WARN notice with the state saying that 250 workers would be laid off between March 18 and April 1. Those layoffs came only three months after the company announced it was terminating 400, before reducing that number to 180. The layoffs were part of the company’s strategy to transfer much of the work it does to a new $313 million facility in Columbia, S.C.
The company chose to shift the operations to South Carolina due to tax incentives offered by government officials. South Carolina’s tax package had the potential of $352.3 million in savings, mostly from tax exemptions from property taxes for 30 years. BioSpace previously reported another tax may have played a factor in the move—the way the states tax the actual equipment in the facility, rather than just the building and company. In Florida, the equipment inside the facility is taxed the same way the real estate is. South Carolina, as well as other states, including Texas, cap the amount of equipment and personal property that can be taxed, or often exemptions.
On its website, the company includes a portal to apply for positions at its South Carolina location. The company has open positions for analytical chemists, R&D engineers, quality assurance supervisors and more.
The Sentinel also noted that Kennedy is originally from South Carolina and still maintains a home in Columbia.
