Nephron, one of Lexington’s largest employers, lists headquarters for sale
Nephron Pharmaceuticals, one of the largest employers in Lexington County, has listed its headquarters in West Columbia for sale.
The company’s 700,000+ square-foot drug manufacturing facility located at 4500 12th St. Ext. is listed for sale-leaseback, which is a real estate transaction in which a company sells its property with the intention of having it leased back to it to rent.
The building was listed Aug. 26 for $340 million by commercial real estate firm Kwekel Companies.
“A sale leaseback enables a company to reduce its investment in these non-core business assets (the land & building) and liberate the cash in exchange for executing a lease and paying rent,” Kwekel Companies’ website reads.
According to the listing, Nephron intends to enter into a 20-year lease on the building when the sale closes.
“It’s just a cash-out refinancing, a way of getting cash out of the property,” company spokesperson Zach Pippin told The State.
The move comes months after the pharmaceutical company took out a $350 million credit line with private credit investment management company WhiteHawk Capital Partners. That money was intended to help support the company’s “recapitalization and liquidity for continued growth,” according to a release issued at the time.
It also comes after Nephron’s owner and CEO Lou Kennedy sold her Lake Murray estate for a record-breaking $9.25 million in March of this year.
When asked if the moves were indicative of any problems at the company, a spokesperson said they were typical of a business making hundreds of millions of dollars in investments.
“Those large numbers aren’t all done by one person. It’s usually done by a team of investors and institutions and that’s what we’re doing,” Pippin said.
He pointed to adjusting to life after COVID as a pharmaceutical company as a complicating factor, adding that Nephron is reassessing with how the Food and Drug Administration is handling things and figuring out “where the business goes in 10 years.”
The company has faced regulatory trouble in recent years with the FDA over failing to safely produce its drugs.
Nephron was an impressive economic development score by the county when the company opened its West Columbia facility in 2014. The drug-manufacturer expanded its operations when it opened a medical-grade glove manufacturing plant in late 2022 and was praised by the state for its promised investment of $100 million and 250 jobs.
As a result of its investment — Nephron employed more than 1,000 in December of last year, the most recent publicly available data — the company has received a number of tax incentives and credits from both the county and state. County officials extended its tax incentives agreement, which cut its property tax assessment ratio from 10.5% to 4% and capped its millage rate for decades, in 2020, and later amended the agreement to include the glove manufacturing facility.
This story was originally published August 30, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
