International group Zoetis scoops historic manufacturing site

Global animal health company Zoetis has bought a historic manufacturing site in the inner Melbourne suburb of Parkville. Picture: David Caird

Global animal health company Zoetis has bought a historic manufacturing site in the inner Melbourne suburb of Parkville and will expand its operations when the biotechnology giant CSL departs for its new facilities.

Under a multistage property deal, CSL sold the 11.2ha Poplar Rd site to the Victorian government, which on-sold the bulk of it to Zoetis.

The government billed the move as ensuring that biomedical manufacturing would be continued on the site and flagged that Zoetis would establish sovereign manufacturing capabilities, create up to 95 jobs and acquire most of the site, in moves valued at about $350m.

Zoetis’s veterinary product manufacturing will expand on this site and continue more than 100 years of biomedical research and health operations.

CSL will pour some of the sale proceeds into building its nearby new global headquarters and research centre in the Parkville Biomedical Precinct.

The site has been the long-term home of CSL, formerly the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories. After 107 years, CSL will fully vacate the site when it will move its remaining operations to new facilities.

CSL is also building an industrial scale influenza and antivenene manufacturing facility on Sky Rd in Tullamarine. This operation will remain at Parkville under a leasehold arrangement until the new Tullamarine facility is completed.

Zoetis’s footprint on this site began in 1922 as the animal health division of the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories. The unit was sold to Pfizer in 2004 and is now part of Zoetis.

Before CSL was established, vaccines were being produced on the site by Dr Graham Mitchell, a veterinary surgeon and pharmacist, who, in 1881, established a calf lymph depot on this land for the preparation of smallpox vaccine based on the Jenner method.

Zoetis produces cattle, horse and sheep vaccines, along with vaccines for dogs, cats and pigs, at the site.

The Parkville purchase adds to Zoetis’s acquisition of Jurox in 2022, which gave it a second Australian manufacturing site, in the NSW Hunter Valley, to produce pharmaceutical products for a variety of species.

Zoetis’s footprint at the Parkville site will grow five times as it expands operations over the years ahead.

“We are excited to increase our investment in Australia and provide greater support to Australia’s farmers and veterinarians – who rely on our vaccines, medicines and diagnostic tools to keep their animals healthy and productive,” Zoetis chief executive Kristin Peck said.