CONSHOHOCKEN – The Keystone state’s most powerful company, revenue-wise, is moving into Conshohocken by the end of the year.
AmerisourceBergen, a wholesale pharmaceutical distributor based in Chesterbrook, is expanding operations to the Millennium III office building at 227 Washington St., adding 185 jobs for starters.
‘We’ve been experiencing great success and great growth and we’re growing the number of associates that we have in the Philadelphia area,’ said Brett Ludwig, AmerisourceBergen’s vice president of communications. ‘We may grow up to 200 or 250 employees in Conshohocken when it’s fully filled.’
Most of the new jobs will be full-time, salaried positions in business operations and IT, at either the existing Chesterbrook office or Conshohocken, Ludwig explained.
The jobs are part of the company’s commitment to Gov. Tom Corbett’s Life Sciences Leadership Advisory Council, ‘to strengthen what is already a burgeoning Pennsylvania industry,’ Gov. Corbett said in a statement.
AmerisourceBergen will renovate the Millennium III space to ‘provide a great work place environment for our employees,’ Ludwig allowed.
The $100 billion-company, which also maintains a distribution center in Bethlehem, will retain 850 existing jobs in the Philadelphia area, noted Ludwig, who said Millennium III was chosen from a number of contenders partly because of its close proximity to the Chesterbrook location.
‘It’s a great central location close to our existing office that allows us to provide expansion as we’re creating new jobs, and also allows us to reallocate some of our existing employees here in Chesterbrook to that facility. This is a true expansion. It’s an exciting time for AmerisourceBergen because of the growth we’re having because of how we’re shaping health care delivery, and we’re able to expand our presence in the Philadelphia marketplace.’
AmerisourceBergen, which is the leading Pennsylvania company by revenue, ranking 32nd on the Fortune 500 list for 2013, provides drug distribution and related services to a wide range of health care providers throughout the U.S. and around the world, including chain and independent pharmacies, hospital systems, physicians’ offices, health care centers and oncology centers, Ludwig noted.
‘We also provide a lot of backup services to manufacturers, including consulting to health outcomes research (HOR) with detailed analysis into health care trends,’ he added.
‘When you look at the overall health care spectrum, you have manufacturers, the distribution side and the delivery side – the pharmacists and doctors who are delivering pharmaceutical therapies and products to their patients – our expertise truly lies in logistics and supply chain management expertise,’ Ludwig said.
‘We have very knowledgeable employees in the supply chain and our reach expands 52 countries, We’re an organization that really provides a lot of value to independent pharmacies and we also have great partnerships with huge companies like Walgreens and manufacturers. So when we look at the space we occupy and where we can provide value, it’s in that outreach partnership that we can provide that really helps generate the kind of growth we are experiencing.’
AmerisourceBergen Corporation was formed in 2001 by the merger of AmeriSource Health Corporation and Bergen Brunswig, a company that can trace its roots back to founder Lucien Napoleon Brunswig’s retail drug store in Atchison, Kan., in the 1870s.
Follow Gary Puleo on Twitter @Mustangman48.
