LIBERTYVILLE, Ill.—Medline Industries is moving about 600 employees to the former Motorola Mobility campus in Libertyville as more health care providers look to the Northfield company for customized medical supplies.
The manufacturer and distributor lans to spend $14 million upgrading 140,000 square feet in the East Building on the 84-acre corporate campus now dubbed Innovation Park Lake County. The space, Medline's seventh in Lake County, will become a national sales support hub for the growing company, which signed a 10-year lease.
Medline reported $13.9 billion in 2019 revenue, up 19 percent from a year earlier. It has about 4,650 Chicago-area workers, up 35 percent from 2017, and more than 20,000 employees worldwide.
"Increasingly, health care providers look to Medline for customized solutions," CEO Charlie Mills said in a statement. "We've expanded the teams that create, design and support our customers, and this investment in Lake County is the next step in creating a center of collaboration that focuses on making health care run better."
Most of the 600 employees moving to the new facility in Libertyville are coming from the company's Northfield headquarters and Mundelein campus, both of which are at capacity, the statement reads. The company said the move also frees up space for "new roles and functions in the future."
Spokesman William Berger wrote in an email that Medline plans to add up to 4,000 new employees this year to its operations team covering manufacturing distribution centers and other facilities.
Medline's lease is a win for Rockville, Md.-based real estate investor Beco Management, which bought the 1.1 million-sq.-ft. Libertyville campus for $9.5 million in 2014, shortly after Motorola Mobility relocated its operations to downtown Chicago.
Beco began redeveloping the property into a multi-tenant office campus, and in 2016 landed its first tenant, pesticide maker Valent BioSciences. More recently, it has put together a big leasing run: Including Medline, the campus has signed 325,000 square feet of deals in the past 90 days, according to Beco Midwest Vice President of Leasing Meg Grow. Recent additions include the North American headquarters of electric vehicle charging station manufacturer EVBox and energy control device maker Intermatic.
Grow declined to disclose how much available space remains at the property, but said in a statement that the campus is "trending toward 90 percent occupancy" by the end of this year.
"This is a testament to the fact that occupiers and employers find value in staying and expanding in the suburbs," she said in the statement.
Meanwhile, Medline is among makers of personal protective equipment that could be affected as the coronavirus spreads worldwide and the demand for medical supplies increases.
"We have put in place inventory management programs to protect as much inventory as possible for our customers," the company said in a February statement. "In addition, we are actively working on options to increase production in other areas of our global supply chain, while diligently monitoring the situation in China."