A firm chosen to manufacture millions of doses of coronavirus vaccines says it has a “strong pipeline” of companies that want to work with it in the battle against the pandemic.
Teesside firm Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies has recently been contracted to manufacture 60m doses of the Novavax vaccine at its Billingham site.
Now it has released accounts for the year ending March 31 2020 which show that operating profit rose £900,000 to £23m even as revenues fell by 9% to £114.2m.
The year saw the company invest in its facilities while it added almost 80 new employees to its headcount.
In the accounts, the company said: “This result has been driven by a sustained demand for batch manufacture across the small scale, large scale and mammalian sectors and analytical services which continues to grow from strength to strength.
“As the company continues to grow it has seen an increase in operational fixed costs to support this growth, however, the company continues to benefit from research and development expenditure credit which has offset this increase.”
The company said it had reacted to the pandemic by introducing social distancing to its site and having around half of employees working from home. Nobody from the firm had been furloughed, however.
It said there was a “strong pipeline of organisations” wanting the company to be its manufacturing partner in the fight against Covid-19.
During the accounting year, the company’s staff numbers increased from 653 to 752. It recently said that headcount had reached around 800, 300 of which will work on the Novavax vaccine.
MPs and politicians on Teesside have praised the company’s facilities for its role in manufacturing vaccines.
