Biontech is closing plants in Marburg, Tübingen and Idar-Oberstein - end of a pandemic-related production phase

It wasn't too long ago that things seemed to have come full circle in Marburg. When the Mainz-based company Biontech announced in September 2020 that it would take over the Marburg production site from the Swiss company Novartis in order to make mass production of the Comirnaty vaccine possible there at lightning speed, many remembered the city's tradition in the pharmaceutical sector. After all, Emil von Behring laid the foundation stone for one of Germany's most important pharmaceutical locations there in 1904 and invested part of the prize money that he had received in 1901 for the first Nobel Prize in Medicine.

This means that the place where von Behring once developed a groundbreaking serum therapy against diphtheria was suddenly once again at the center of a medical revolution. But now this hopeful chapter is closing. On Monday, Biontech announced that it would be giving up the Hessian factory, as well as the production sites in Tübingen and Idar-Oberstein.

It would be too easy to accuse the company of building up excessive capacity during the pandemic. In fact, Marburg has contributed a large part to the ramp-up of vaccine production. The investment in Hesse was not a strategic mistake, but rather the necessary response to an exceptional historical situation.

Nevertheless, the abandonment of the plants is more than just the end of a special economic situation caused by the pandemic. Biontech has been in a transition phase for years: The company has to break away from its extraordinary dependence on the Covid vaccine and bring new products, especially in cancer medicine, to market maturity. This process takes time, that is clear. However, it is unfortunate that management has failed to build a bridge to the next phase for state-of-the-art production capacity. The makers of Biontech's success have apparently failed to ask the question of what will happen to the locations after the end of the pandemic - and thus missed the opportunity to strategically secure them at an early stage.

The fact that external investors were apparently not interested points to a fundamental problem: in Germany there is a lot of talk about the importance of biotechnology and pharmaceuticals, but apparently that is not enough to attract companies to a modern location with a lot of tradition and correspondingly good skilled workers. This is sad for the city of Marburg and especially for the employees. And a warning signal for Germany as a pharmaceutical location.