GSK to cement split with two new headquarters

Oct 11 (Reuters) - GlaxoSmithKline on Monday laid
out plans for a new, 120 million pound ($164 million)
headquarters for its soon-to-be-independent consumer healthcare
business and also said its remaining pharmaceuticals and
vaccines staff will relocate.

GSK is due to be split in two in the middle of next year in
its biggest shake-up in two decades with the consumer healthcare
arm, a joint venture with Pfizer known for brands such
as Sensodyne toothpaste and Advil painkillers, becoming a
separately listed company.

Headquarters for the new business, including research
facilities, will be built in Weybridge, southwest of London, to
house 1,400 staff from the end of 2024.

However, staff will first relocate from GSK's current
corporate headquarters in Brentford, west London, to temporary
facilities in Weybridge when the split takes place in mid-2022.

Weybridge is already home to a GSK oral health research and
development (R&D) site and Procter & Gamble has an
operation in the area..

The rest of GSK's Brentford staff, working for the
pharmaceuticals and vaccines business, will move to an
as-yet-undetermined site in the same area at the end of 2023 or
later, with the pharma giant saying it would be "maintaining
access to the UK’s world-leading science and innovation hubs".

GSK said it planned to provide further updates on that
location in mid-2022.

GSK House, as the Brentford headquarters are known, was
built about 20 years ago after the merger of SmithKline Beecham
and GlaxoWellcome in 2000 created GSK. A spokesperson said it
was too spacious to house either of the two successor companies.

Relocating can be thorny as evidenced by years of delays in
building AstraZeneca's new corporate centre and large
R&D campus in the English university city of Cambridge.

In 2013, when the scheme was first unveiled, costs were put
at 330 million pounds and the aim was to inaugurate the centre
by 2016 but construction took until 2020 and costs ballooned to
about 1 billion pounds.

The listing of the GSK's consumer healthcare business will
deliver an 8 billion pound ($11 billion) windfall and other
financial benefits to bolster drug development at the
pharmaceuticals business.

($1 = 0.7335 pounds)

(Reporting by Ludwig Burger; Editing by Kirsten Donovan)