AstraZeneca to sell French plant

London, UK-headquartered AstraZeneca is selling its plant at Monts near Tours in France, one of its three facilities in the country, to Recip Pharma of Sweden. Recip has already acquired two plants in Sweden from the Anglo-Swedish group in 2002 and 2004.

A spokesman for AstraZeneca said a number of offers had been received for the site but Recip's was the only bid with the requisite guarantees on jobs. AstraZeneca has been producing 37 million units of local sterile injectable anesthetic of the xylocaine type at Monts. The company said that, because production was sterile, manufacturing costs were high and margins had been falling. The competition from generics has pushed AstraZeneca into a general industrial restructuring. Recip Pharma has annual sales of around 100.0 million euros ($129.4 million).