Waters Corp. Consolidates In Milford
It's been a busy past few years for Waters Corp. in Milford.
The international laboratory equipment manufacturer is capping off a five-year, $45 million renovation and expansion project by closing a warehouse in Franklin and consolidating its offices at its Milford headquarters.
During the last five years the company's headquarters has grown by about 50 percent to 750,000 square feet as new "clean" manufacturing facilities have been built in Milford, according to company officials.
Now, the final piece of the plan is to finalize the clean lab space and move offices in Franklin into the Milford facility.
Coming Together
The expansion of the 500,000-square-foot Waters headquarters at 34 Maple St. in Milford began in 2004 when the company purchased a 250,000-square-foot building at 5 Technology Drive, which is adjacent to the company's headquarters.
Since then the company has spent about $40 million to install a connector between the two buildings and update the lab and research spaces throughout the Milford campus, according to Peter Hicks, director of facilities for Waters Corp.
During the past few years the company has also been constructing new clean manufacturing spaces that are used to build some of the company's newest products, which require completely sterile production facilities.
Construction on the clean manufacturing facilities (at a price tag of $5 million) is expected to be complete in July. That will free up space at the headquarters to move operations that are currently being performed at 20 Liberty Way in Franklin to Milford.
The company leases the 32,000-square-foot distribution space on Liberty Way in Franklin. The 23 employees currently working out of Franklin will be making the move to Milford, according to Hicks.
The lease on the Franklin property is set to expire in March 2011, and Hicks said he expects the consolidation of the Franklin operations into the Milford campus to be complete by January 2011.
According to online records from the Franklin board of assessor's office, the Liberty Way property in is owned by the Lincoln Property Group in Burlington.
Officials from Lincoln Property Group did not return calls for comment.
Waters Corp. has no additional construction projects planned in the future, but the company does own vacant land near the Milford headquarters if expansion is necessary, Hicks said.
Waters makes a wide variety of scientific tools, but one key product that will be made in the new clean facility is an ultra high-performance liquid chromatography system, which can identify compounds and elements in a specific sample, according to Jeff Tarmy, manager of corporate communications for the company.
Waters reported $75.7 million in profits during the first quarter, a 3 percent increase over the previous year.The company has 5,200 employees around the world, including about 1,200 in Milford.
Officials in Milford are happy to see the investments in the community.
"They've been a great tenant for a number of years, and it's obviously great to see them consolidate offices into Milford versus the other way around," said Milford Planning Director Larry Dunkin.
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