Glanua has opened its first US office in Radnor, Pennsylvania, a move that gives the Galway water and wastewater engineering firm a foothold in America's pharmaceutical manufacturing build-out just as reshoring investment in the sector accelerates.

Glanua, founded in 1995 and headquartered in Loughrea, Co Galway, designs, builds, operates and maintains water and wastewater infrastructure for municipal and industrial clients, growing from 545 employees at the end of 2025 to more than 750 today, with a manufacturing facility in Navan, Co Meath and existing operations across Ireland, the UK and a Lisbon engineering hub.

The new US office will initially focus on designing specialist water and wastewater treatment systems for life sciences and food and beverage manufacturers, led by newly appointed US Operations Director Mark McKeever, with plans to build a team of more than 200 employees over time; the expansion is supported by Enterprise Ireland.

Glanua recorded revenue of €155m (£132.4m) in 2025, expects to exceed €200m (£171m) in 2026, and holds an order book worth approximately €900m (£769m) to 2030 as part of a five-year plan targeting €400m (£342m) in annual revenue by 2028.

Glanua is timing its US entry against one of the largest pharmaceutical manufacturing investment cycles on record, rather than treating it as a generic international expansion step.

US pharma reshoring commitments now exceed $480bn (€443bn) across 22 announced sites, driven by Section 232 tariffs on imported branded drugs that took effect from July 2026, with Eli Lilly, Merck and Johnson & Johnson among the companies committing tens of billions of dollars each to significant new domestic capacity.

Specialist water and wastewater infrastructure is a genuine bottleneck within that wider build-out, since complex treatment systems must be designed and commissioned alongside the production facilities themselves rather than bolted on afterwards.

For the sector, Irish and European engineering firms with established life sciences credentials are positioned to capture a share of this US pharmaceutical construction wave even without domestic manufacturing capacity of their own, competing instead on specialist design and delivery expertise built on decades of European regulatory experience.

Source: Irish Building Magazine / Pharmaceutical Commerce