Amgen Will Lease GTECH's West Greenwich Headquarters Posted on: Friday, 2 June 2006, 18:00 CDT By Andrea L. Stape, The Providence Journal, R.I. Jun. 1--WEST GREENWICH -- Amgen Inc., the world's largest biotechnology company, strengthened its foothold in Rhode Island yesterday, agreeing to lease GTECH Holdings Corp.'s current headquarters for seven years to accommodate continuing growth. The two companies now share a corporate office park off Route 95. But GTECH is preparing to move the bulk of its Rhode Island employees out of its main West Greenwich office building at the end of the year and into a newly constructed corporate headquarters in downtown Providence. Over the past four years, Amgen's growth in Rhode Island has been explosive. The company spent about $1.5 billion to retrofit one drug manufacturing plant, build a second, put up an administration building, a laboratory and a parking garage. It has grown from about 300 employees in 2002 to about 1,300 today and expects to add an additional 450 workers to its complex by the end of the year. With GTECH looking to fill the office building and Amgen continuing to grow and eager to get workers out of temporary office trailers, the biotechnology company agreed to lease the 93,000-square-foot building GTECH is vacating. The lease deal between the two companies was announced by Governor Carcieri and representatives from GTECH and Amgen in front of the West Greenwich office building yesterday afternoon. To commemorate the lease, Kimball Hall, Amgen's new vice president and general manager of Rhode Island operations, and Carcieri raised the Amgen flag on one of the many flagpoles outside the building. The flagpoles bear the state and country flags of GTECH's lottery customers. "We have a lot of positives going on now on the back of two great companies," the governor said. Both companies declined to release details of the lease, other than to say that Amgen does hold an option to buy the property. Higher-end suburban office space in Rhode Island has been leasing for an average of $21 to $23 a square foot, including operating expenses and taxes, said Peter Hayes, partner and cofounder of Hayes & Sherry, the Providence commercial real-estate company GTECH hired to help market its West Greenwich property. By comparison, the asking price to rent the extra office space in GTECH's new Providence building at the corner of Memorial Boulevard and Francis Street is $38 to $40 a square foot, including taxes and operating expenses, Hayes said. GTECH plans to start moving people into its downtown building by the end of October, according to Erik Dyson, the company's senior director of real estate. It will then do some renovations to its current manufacturing and assembly facility -- which is adjacent to its West Greenwich office building. GTECH will keep the assembly facility, moving some employees back into the space after the renovations, Dyson said. Amgen will then spend the beginning of next year retrofitting the former GTECH office building before moving in during the second quarter of 2007, said Larry Bernard, Rhode Island spokesman for Amgen. He estimates that 300 people will eventually occupy the building. This is not the first time Amgen and GTECH have been in talks about the building. In 2003, when GTECH was first in discussions with the state about building a corporate headquarters downtown, company executives said that Amgen had plans to buy GTECH's West Greenwich offices. The building, however, was never sold and Amgen moved forward with plans to build a new administrative building adjacent to its two manufacturing plants, which produce the rheumatoid arthritis drug Enbrel. GTECH decided to relocate to Providence in return for an incentive-packed deal to run the state lottery for 20 years. Since then, though, Amgen has continued to grow exponentially. The company is constructing the administration building, but still needs more space, said Bernard. A large number of employees -- include Hall and Bernard -- have been working in barracks-looking temporary trailers with wooden stairs attached to the outside. Amgen approached GTECH about the building earlier this year after GTECH indicated it planned to sell the building, Dyson said. "We're thrilled with the way it works out," said Bernard. "It provides us ready access with minimal disruption to our operations, and it ties up one of the major parcels that GTECH has in a nice neat little package." GTECH, which is being sold to Italian lottery operator Lottomatica SpA, is working to sell the 51.3 acres it owns in West Greenwich. The company received approval by the town to create a special management district and is planning to divide the land into eight parcels and sell them to developers for use as commercial, office and potential hotel sites, said Dyson. GTECH would remain a tenant in its current manufacturing and assembly facility. The office building Amgen is leasing with an option to buy is still on the market, Hayes said. He anticipates that GTECH will be able to sell the building for more if it is rented than if it had been on the market empty. "It dramatically increases the value of the property," Hayes said. ----- To see more of the The Providence Journal, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.projo.com. Copyright (c) 2006, The Providence Journal, R.I. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.
This is water under the dam but I will add that the person that did sign that lease got a $54,000 bonus in March. See what she can F@^*up in ALM?
