November 18, 2014
By Riley McDermid, BioSpace.com Breaking News Editor
Abbott Vascular will lay off 100 employees at its plant in Temecula, Calif., as it continues its restructuring plans announced in 2012, the company said Tuesday. The same plant lost 200 job in July 2012 and will bring the total number of employees there down to 1,700 from a high of 4,000 in 2012.
“We’re making adjustments to our workforce to increase efficiencies and remain competitive in a challenging global environment,” company spokesman Steve Kelly said in a statement to The Press-Enterprise.
Parent company Abbott Laboratories said that the plant, which makes equipment for cardiac surgery and recovery such as stents and scaffolds, will soon have a timeline for the exact date of the layoffs. The plant was acquired by Abbott when it snapped up heart device maker Guidant Corporation for $4.1 billion in cash in 2006.
Abbott said in 2012 that it will be cut at least 700 jobs in Puerto Rico, California and Chicago, a year after slicing more than 1,900 positions all across the U.S. Illinois was hit that hardest in that wave of cuts, losing 1,000 jobs—a loss Abbott said was a direct result of stricter healthcare regulations globally.
A report in Med Device Online said that in the last two years, “recent layoffs, along with waning investment in the medical device sector, are perhaps the reasons why revenues from the medical device excise tax have fallen short of estimates.”
The report quoted a column in The Federalist by David Hogberg that said followed the industry-wide trend, saying “medical device makers such as Medtronic , Boston Scientific , Stryker, Abbott Laboratories , Johnson & Johnson , and Smith & Nephew all announced layoffs.”
