Guidant's cardiac rhythm management (CRM) business is based in Arden Hills, and the new building will add 640,000 sf to the 500,000-sf building it already owns there, says Dick Vogel, head of finance for the firm. About half of CRM's 4,500 employees are based there. The business has doubled in the last five years, posting $1.2 billion in revenues last year, about half of Guidant's total sales.
The Arden Hills Technology Center was built by Control Data in the 1960s and is nearly filled with such tenants as Syntegra, as well as Guidant, which occupies about 20% of the facility. By buying the building and the 37 acres around it, Guidant will have 1.1 million sf of office and manufacturing space and plenty of room to expand, Vogel says.
Guidant bought the building from the Los Angeles firefighters pension fund. Vogel declined to say how much his company paid for it. While Guidant plans to honor all of the leases in the building, Vogel anticipates the company could eventually occupy the entire building if its growth plans materialize.
Guidant is waiting for approval--expected next month -from the Federal Drug Administration on a new device that is able to resynchronize the heart, says Sanjiv Arora, a securities analyst with Dain Rauscher Wessels in Minneapolis. Fridley, MN-based Medtronic, which competes with Guidant in pacemakers and other cardiac devices, has a similar product in the pipeline awaiting FDA approval, he says. Arora thinks the heart failure therapy could be a "multi-billion dollar" industry, equal to pacemakers and defibrillators.
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