Ace Fabrication building on Johnston County roots
With a new building, Ace Fabrication is more than tripling its Johnston County footprint.
SMITHFIELD — Another Johnston County industry is expanding.
With a new building, Ace Fabrication will more than triple its real estate footprint as it adopts the latest laser and robotic production methods.
The 64-year-old company designs, engineers, builds and installs custom stainless-steel equipment and components for life sciences companies nationwide.
“We’ve been here longer than just about anybody,” Ace Fabrication President Michael Prince said of his company’s presence in Johnston County.
Prince is a veteran of the Research Triangle region’s pharmaceutical sector. Since acquiring Ace Fabrication 10 years ago, he has grown its workforce from 10 to 30 employees — with more hiring likely.
“We’ve been working with life sciences companies since our inception,” Prince said. “About 99 percent of our business is in life sciences. We support all the major manufacturers.”
While Ace delivers stainless-steel products across the country, its work for biotech companies arriving in or expanding across the Triangle has intensified in recent years.
“So much of everything that’s going on involves all the new pharma facilities in the RTP area,” said Prince, whose career spans tenures at Burroughs-Wellcome & Co. (now Thermo Fisher Scientific), Wyeth (now Pfizer) and Biogen.
The Triangle is home to more than 600 life sciences companies, ranging from early-stage university spin-offs to multibillion-dollar biomanufacturers. Collectively, they employ some 42,000 workers, according to the N.C. Biotech Center.
In economic development lingo, such a concentration of one industry in a region is known as a cluster.
“Clusters are about supply-chain concentration,” explained Ted Abernathy, who helped guide regional economic development for the Research Triangle Regional Partnership before launching Economic Leadership LLC, a consulting firm.
Increasingly, supply-chain clusters are important, Abernathy said. “Data analytics can provide expanding companies the means to judge places faster and with greater anonymity,” he said. “And one of the things they judge is supply-chain clusters.”
Along with supply chains, talent pipelines are another essential ingredient for clusters. Johnston County supercharged its life sciences cluster in 2004 with the opening of Johnston Community College’s Workforce Development Center, which offers training programs to meet the talent needs of Grifols and Novo Nordisk. More recently, JCC’s Advanced Manufacturing Training Facility in Four Oaks is growing a talent pipeline to support defense-oriented manufacturers and other 21st-century industries.
“Supply chains and training are the keys to competitiveness,” Abernathy said. “It’s like blocking and tackling in football. You’ve got to do it.”
A specialized place in the supply chain
Ace Fabrication offers an up-close view of how the Triangle Region’s biotech cluster operates.
Ace works directly with pharmaceutical companies to deliver stainless-steel components, furniture, carts, cabinets and process equipment. But it also works through a network of clean-room companies that contract with biopharma producers.
“Our proximity to our customers is important,” Prince said.
As a fabrication shop, Ace sets itself apart from competitors because it uses only stainless steel to avoid the risk of contamination from mixed materials.
“Hardly anyone else has the volume to be exclusively stainless steel,” Prince said. “That’s a key advantage for us.”
On the importance of talent, Prince said “workforce is number one.”
Ace maintains informal relationships with colleges and universities in the region to hire workers with the right skills.
“N.C. State produces a lot of our engineers,” said Prince, who holds a degree in mechanical engineering from N.C. State and a master’s degree in business administration from UNC-Chapel Hill.
The company taps JCC’s welding program for some of its staff and has found Wayne Community College a fertile source of engineering and technical talent.
Making room for growth
Ace Fabrication is working with Goldsboro-based Jackson Builders on its new 33,000-square-foot building. Prince estimates the company will spend a total of $6.5 million on the site, including the installation of new systems such as robotics-driven laser welding equipment.
He and his team have not yet decided what to do with the existing 10,000-square-foot building. Options include leasing some or all of it as renovated office or storage space.
“The support we get from the County and the town is important,” said Prince, who commends Johnston County and the Town of Smithfield for smoothly issuing the permitting and approvals needed for his company’s expansion.
Chris Johnson is director of the Johnston County Economic Development Office.
“Every small business is important to us, but Ace Fabrication is a great example of a homegrown local company extending regional and national supply-chain connections in a lucrative global market,” he said. “Companies like Ace are important because they support the competitive posture of several of our largest private employers while also anchoring our small-business community.”
Moreover, the company’s significance in the region’s economic development picture sparks indirect benefits, Johnson said. “As Ace Fabrication supports the growth of the Triangle’s overall life sciences economy, those new jobs and investment dollars can find their way to Johnston County as well,” he said.
Prince expects his company’s new building to be ready by the end of this year. At that point, he can turn his attention to additional hiring needs.
“When we get into the new facility, we’ll have more room and can start adding to our workforce,” Prince said.
The past decade has been a fruitful one for the company. “We’ve grown revenue by a factor of five over the last 10 years,” Prince said.
“We’re a relationship business,” he added. “When we work with a new partner, we rarely ever lose that business — ever.”
Page last updated on: October 16, 2026