PPD's downtown Wilmington high-rise soon for sale: What you need to know
On Monday, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Inc. announced it will explore selling an office building at the north end of downtown Wilmington that's housed clinical research firm PPD for over a decade.
While the company plans to stay in the Wilmington area, it is unclear where it will relocate or who would purchase its 12-story building downtown. The company is in the early stages of finding a new space, which could take more than two years, according to a press release announcing the move.
More: PPD announced a relocation out of downtown Wilmington. Here's what that could mean for the area
More: Amid a changing workplace, PPD to sell downtown offices and look for new space
Exploring a property sale
PPD, the iconic Wilmington drug testing firm was purchased last December by Thermo Fisher Scientific for $17.4 billion. Since then, speculation has swirled around Thermo Fisher's long-term plans for PPD's downtown high-rise, which housed its global headquarters.
On Monday, Thermo Fisher told Wilmington-area employees it would "explore the sale" of the building and embark upon "a multiyear process to identify a new location within Wilmington, North Carolina...to meet our current and future workspace needs."
The Wilmington skyline
PPD's 12-story headquarters building has served as a business anchor on the northern end of downtown since it was built in 2007.
It is the city's tallest building at 193 feet tall.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, as many as 1,700 employees worked in the space.
While PPD offered flexible work options before COVID, the pandemic's mass exodus of employees from office blocks and the rise of remote work raised major questions at Thermo Fisher over the need for such a large office.
Aggressive, massive companies
Thermo Fisher is the world's largest maker of scientific instruments. In 2021, it was ranked 95th on the Fortune 500 list of America's largest companies.
It is based in Massachusetts in a high-tech corridor outside Boston and has annual revenues of about $30 billion, a global workforce of more than 80,000 people, and shares trading on the New York Stock Exchange for about $575.
The future of PPD?
A North Carolina grown superstar of the pharmaceutical sector, PPD was started by pharmacist Fred Eshelman as a one-man consulting firm in 1985.
It matured into a global leader among contract research organizations (CROs) that support pharmaceutical, biotechnology and other medical-based businesses by providing them with research services, such as helping them develop and trial new drugs.
When PPD was purchased, it employed an estimated 26,000 in nearly 50 countries and had roughly $4.7 billion in annual revenue.
At the time, Thermo Fisher Scientific announced that PPD would merge into Thermo Fisher's Laboratory Products and Services Segment.
Just after the sale, executive director of the Southeastern Office of the North Carolina Biotechnology Center, Randall Johnson, was quoted as saying he was not surprised by the transaction, nor was he worried by it, adding that PPD had "spawned the significant regional cluster of CROs" in the Wilmington area.
Reporter Emma Dill can be reached at 910-343-2096 or edill@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Wilmington StarNews: What to know about PPD's relocation out of downtown Wilmington
