The maker of Ozempic is coming to Petersburg

Mar 03, 2025

PETERSBURG – The world’s second-largest pharmaceutical company is taking ownership of AMPAC Fine Chemicals’ Petersburg location.

Denmark-based Novo Nordisk told The Progress-Index in an email Friday morning that it had signed an agreement “to acquire a production facility in Virginia,” but it did not name the exact location. Signs outside of AMPAC’s 600,000 square-foot facility on Normandy Drive, however, have been changed to reflect the new owners.

Rumors of a sale have been floating since summer when media outlets in South Korea – where AMPAC’s parent company SK Pharmetico is based – reported the two sides were in negotiations. As recently as Thursday, a spokesperson for SK Pharmetico told Virginia Business Magazine that it would neither confirm nor deny speculation about AMPAC’s future in Petersburg.

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“The facility will provide small molecule API manufacturing and development capacity for future Novo Nordisk products,” a Novo Nordisk spokesperson confirmed Friday morning.

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Novo Nordisk does not expect any changes in the existing 100-employee workforce, the spokesperson said. “As part of the agreement, all employees currently working at the site will transfer to Novo Nordisk,” she added.

The exact price for the purchase was not disclosed, but Korean news outlets estimated it to be around $216 million.

According to its website, Novo Nordisk was founded in 1923 in Copenhagen, Denmark’s capital city. It is best known for manufacturing diabetes medications, including Ozempic and Wegovy.

Ozempic is used to treat obesity and regulate blood-sugar levels. It accounted for roughly $13.9 billion last year in worldwide sales – 66% of that in the U.S.

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Novo Nordisk was the first manufacturer and distributor of insulin following its discovery by Canadian scientists.

The company also makes and distributes Victoza, another diabetes medicine, as well as blood-disorder, growth-disorder and hormone-therapy medications.

With a market cap of slightly more than $482 billion, Novo Nordisk is the second-largest medicine manufacturer in the world, trailing only Eli Lilly & Co.’s $688.7 billion. It is followed in order by Johnson & Johnson, AbbVie and Merck.

At a Ward 1 constituents’ meeting on Dec. 18, Petersburg city manager March Altman announced the transaction, noting how quietly it was done with the sign changes.

“They are now residents of Petersburg,” Altman told the meeting. “That’s going to be huge for us in the long run. We hope they are doing something similar to what they are doing in their Clayton, North Carolina, facility. At that facility alone, they announced a $4 billion expansion.”

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Novo Nordisk has two facilities in North Carolina – Durham is the other location. There are also three offices in Massachusetts near Boston, and one location each in New Hampshire, New Jersey (its U.S.-based corporate headquarters), Colorado and California.

AMPAC, an almost 80-year-old company, arrived in Petersburg in 2019, taking over the former Boehringer Ingelheim Chemicals site in Petersburg Industrial Park.

It was seen as the nucleus for what would become Petersburg’s “pharma cluster” expansion. Phlow Corporation and the non-profit insulin company Civica Rx eventually located in Petersburg, with Phlow sharing space with AMPAC and Civica Rx settling in across Normandy Drive.

In 2022, the cluster shared in $52.9 million in federal “Build Back Better” funding as part of the Petersburg-Richmond medicine-making initiative. The following year, the U.S. Economic Development Association designated the cluster as one of 31 national “tech hub” locations, making it eligible to apply for more federal dollars.

Bill Atkinson (he/him/his) is an award-winning journalist who covers breaking news, government and politics. Reach him at [email protected] or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @BAtkinson_PI.