Job creation has grown explosively in Hanmi Pharmaceutical’s research and development sector, in which the drugmaker has made an extensive investment in recent years, company officials said Wednesday.

As things stand now, Hanmi and other pharmaceutical companies will be able to serve as priming water for the new government’s policy that focuses on the “fourth industrial revolution” and the “creation of decent jobs,” they added.

The number of full-time employees hired for Hanmi’splant in Pyeongtaek, Gyeonggi Province has increased more than nine times over the past four years, from 49 in 2013 to 456 this year.

Hanmi has hired 60 to 160 employees a year since 2013. Its Pyeongtaek plant, which produces drugs for multinational pharmaceutical companies that have signed license contracts with Hanmi, has seen a steady climb in the number of workers from 107 employees in 2014 to 224 employees in 2015, 384 in 2016, and 456 this year.

Another plant in Hwaseong, in the same province, has also created more than 100 new jobs in the past three years, the company said.

The pharmaceutical industry as a whole has recorded a steady increase in the number of human resources to match the needs for promoting knowledge-based industry, experts say. As of 2016, 94,929 people were working in the pharmaceutical industry, which is a 27.5 percent increase over 2011. The numbers indicate an increase of 20,000 workers over the past five years, or a rise of 4,000 employees a year.

The number of researchers in the field increased to 11,862 in 2016, with 800 people hired in 2016 alone.

Hanmi has invested more than 15 percent of its sales into R&D to develop new drugs while spending hundreds of billions of won on cutting-edge plant facilities to sustain R&D. All these efforts are expected to create hundreds of new jobs in the second half of this year, the company said.

Hanmi expects the pharmaceutical industry will contribute to the creation of new, high-quality jobs and advance the fourth industrial revolution, in keeping with the policies pushed by the Moon Jae-in administration.

“Since the pharmaceutical industry is to contribute significantly to propelling R&D and job creation policies spearheaded by the government, the Moon administration also needs to expand efforts to build an environment where pharmaceutical companies can go all out to beef up R&D activities,” a Hanmi official said.