An exterior view of Factory 1 at Lotte Biologics' Songdo Bio Campus in Incheon. [Lotte Biologics]
An exterior view of Factory 1 at Lotte Biologics' Songdo Bio Campus in Incheon. [Lotte Biologics]

Lotte Biologics is consolidating all of its domestic staff at its Songdo Bio Campus in Incheon, formally opening what the company calls its "Songdo era."

All roughly 650 domestic employees will begin reporting to the new Songdo Bio Campus headquarters on Monday, according to the pharmaceutical and biotech industry. The move brings together business, research and administrative staff who had been spread across multiple locations — including the main office at Lotte World Tower in Jamsil, Seoul, a temporary Songdo office and the Factory 1 construction site.

"We expect work efficiency to improve significantly as all business divisions and employees gather on a single campus and operate as one team," a Lotte Biologics official said. "We will redouble our efforts to prepare the Songdo factory for operation, as it will serve as the key hub for securing large-scale contracts."

The consolidation coincides with the completion and occupancy approval of Songdo Factory 1, the company's production anchor, putting the biotech ambitions of Shin Yoo-yeol squarely to the test. Shin is the son of Lotte Group Chairman Shin Dong-bin and serves as co-CEO of Lotte Biologics and head of the future growth division at Lotte Holdings.

Factory 1 at the Songdo Bio Campus received its occupancy approval roughly two years after breaking ground, well below the three-and-a-half years or more typically required to build a biopharmaceutical production facility. The plant uses a vertically integrated design in which culture media are prepared on the top fifth floor and fed down to floors one through three; the critical third-floor cultivation hall houses eight stainless-steel bioreactors of 15,000 liters each, for a combined capacity of 120,000 liters. The facility is also equipped with an unmanned robotic warehouse offering 6,030 storage slots and a 24-hour real-time monitoring system centered on a central control room, completing a fully smart-plant infrastructure.

As the hardware takes shape, group-level financial backing is providing strong support for the Songdo launch. Lotte Biologics recently approved a rights offering of 255.3 billion won ($180 million) to raise facility funding, with parent company Lotte Holdings contributing 155 billion won and Hotel Lotte and Japan's Lotte Holdings also participating. Since entering the contract development and manufacturing organization business in 2022, Lotte Holdings' cumulative equity injections into Lotte Biologics have reached approximately 883.1 billion won, with the group's total cumulative investment standing at around 1.5 trillion won.

On top of that, Lotte Holdings signed a 900 billion won liquidity support agreement with a lending syndicate in March to back facility loans and has also provided payment guarantees on borrowings by the US subsidiary. Industry observers expect that a portion of the 1.31 trillion won Hotel Lotte secured from the sale of Lotte Rental will also be channeled into the biotech business. The moves reflect Chairman Shin Dong-bin's commitment to nurturing biotech as the group's core future growth engine — a priority he has backed personally by visiting operations on the ground.

Lotte Biologics plans to achieve "GMP-ready" status by year-end, pulling the target forward by six months from the originally planned second quarter of next year. After trial runs and production process validation in the second half of the year, the company will hold an official commissioning ceremony in November and move to the front lines of global contract solicitation. That will activate a dual-site structure linking the Syracuse, New York campus — specialized in clinical-batch production and already carrying an FDA inspection record — with Songdo as the large-scale commercial production hub. The company aims to transplant Syracuse's quality management systems to Songdo and secure major commercial contracts with global pharmaceutical companies before the end of the year.


silverpaper@heraldcorp.com