Johnson & Johnson’s $55 billion US commitment begins with Eastern NC plant groundbreaking
On Friday, the same day Johnson & Johnson committed to spend $55 billion domestically over the next four years, company officials were in Eastern North Carolina to mark the first major investment toward this goal.
Executives mingled with North Carolina leaders in the city of Wilson to ceremonially break ground on Johnson & Johnson’s promised $2 billion drug ingredients factory, about 45 miles east of Raleigh. The drug substance plant expects to create at least 420 jobs at a median salary above $110,000.
Speakers at Friday’s ceremony included Gov. Josh Stein, Democratic U.S. Rep. Don Davis, and Jay Timmons, the longtime president of the National Association of Manufacturers.
“We have an exceptional infrastructure designed to attract, nurture and expand life sciences corporations here in the state of North Carolina,” Stein said. “And that is what brings us here today.”
Johnson & Johnson is a pharmaceutical giant. It’s the 23rd-largest public company in the world, with a market capitalization approaching $400 billion. On March 21, it released plans to increase its U.S. spending by 25% compared to the past four years. This initiative includes its 500,000-square-foot Wilson plant, which Johnson & Johnson announced in October.
The company held its ceremony Friday on the campus of Barton College, though its actual plant site will be a corporate park near Wilson’s existing Merck facility.
“This is going to expand our capacity to deliver transformational medicines for people living with cancer, for immune mediated diseases and neurological diseases, areas of really high unmet medical need,” said Jennifer Taubert, Johnson & Johnson’s executive vice president of innovative medicine.
Taubert said the future plant will eventually have more than 500 “specialized employees and contractors,” a hiring target above what the state had announced for the project in October.
To lure Johnson & Johnson, North Carolina awarded a job development investment grant worth up to $13.6 million in payroll tax breaks if the company achieves its hiring goals between 2027 and 2031. North Carolina’s total incentives for the project could reach $30 million, including $13 million from the Golden LEAF Foundation, a nonprofit created in 1999 to help revitalize rural tobacco-dependent manufacturing hotbeds like Wilson.
With the arrival of Johnson & Johnson, Eastern North Carolina builds on its status for large-scale pharmaceutical manufacturing. In September, Wilson County announced the British maker of the popular flu and cold medication Mucinex would open a factory in the city. And the region overall supports production sites from Thermo Fisher Scientific, Merck, Novo Nordisk, Grifols, Pfizer and Catalent.
In a news release Friday, Johnson & Johnson was the latest pharmaceutical company to credit President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cut with job creation. Portions of the 2017 Tax Cuts & Jobs Act that specifically benefited large biotech corporations are set to expire at the end of this year.
This story was originally published March 21, 2025 at 4:23 PM with the headline "Johnson & Johnson’s $55 billion US commitment begins with Eastern NC plant groundbreaking."
