Governor Shapiro at the PGA: Billions In, More Coming
While most eyes at Aronimink Golf Club were tracking scorecards, Governor Josh Shapiro was working the gallery with a different kind of pitch, writes Ryan Mulligan for The Philadelphia Business Journal.
Shapiro, an Abington native, used his time at the PGA Championship in Delaware County as something of an impromptu economic press conference. He rattled off a string of major corporate investments that suggest southeastern Pennsylvania is having a moment.
The headline figure: Johnson & Johnson’s planned $1 billion cell therapy manufacturing facility in Lower Gwynedd, a project poised to generate hundreds of jobs and further cement Montgomery County’s status as a life sciences hub.
Close behind is Eli Lilly and Company’s staggering $3.5 billion manufacturing commitment to the Lehigh Valley. This signals that the region is increasingly punching at the national level when it comes to landing biotech and pharmaceutical investment.
But the story isn’t confined to a single announcement or zip code. Across Montgomery County, corporate momentum has been quietly compounding in communities like Conshohocken, King of Prussia, Horsham, and Ambler.
Pharmaceutical companies, AI firms, logistics operators, and advanced manufacturers are arriving and expanding.
And Shapiro suggested the pipeline isn’t empty. “We’ve got a couple more I’m going to be announcing later this summer, early in the fall,” he told reporters. “Creating jobs, economic opportunity is what it’s all about.”
His presence at Aronimink wasn’t incidental. For Shapiro, events like the PGA Championship, with their concentration of corporate sponsors, C-suite executives, and deep-pocketed investors, have become a deliberate feature of Pennsylvania’s economic development playbook. “We can do big things here in Pennsylvania,” he said.
With Montgomery County emerging as one of the region’s most coveted addresses for corporate investment, state leaders clearly have no intention of letting up.
Source: Philadelphia Today