Teva Continues Restructuring With 46 Cuts in New Jersey

More job cuts have been announced in the United States as Teva Pharmaceuticals continues to grapple with its debt and a restructuring of its research and development division.

On Tuesday, 46 cuts were discovered at a Teva facility in Parsippany, N.J. The cuts were apparently announced in late January with a WARN (Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act) notice filed with the state, Parsippany Focus reported. There was little information as to when the layoffs would occur or if they were en masse or staggered over time. The Focus noted that it is also unclear how many Teva employees remain in New Jersey at this time. The Israel-based company also has sites in Fairfield and Hackensack, the Focus said.

The cuts in New Jersey are the second wave of U.S.-based cuts Teva has made. In January, the company slashed 208 employees in neighboring Pennsylvania. Those cuts, as BioSpace reported last month, were planned to occur across several of Teva’s locations in the Philadelphia area. According to a WARN notice filed in Pennsylvania, the cuts were expected to include 65 positions at locations in North Wales and Horsham, 47 positions in West Chester and 96 positions in Frazer and Great Valley.

The cuts that have so far been announced in the United States are a small part of the thousands of positions Teva has planned to eliminate in its restructuring. In December, Teva announced it was slashing approximately 14,000 jobs, about 25 percent of its global workforce. Alongside those job cuts, Teva said it was also closing a number of facilities as part of its restructuring. Divesting the properties will help the company achieve its goal of efficiency and substantial cost savings, the company said. Many of the facilities that were being cut were those the company gained through acquisitions and were in many ways redundant.

Teva is grappling with a debt of between $30 and $35 billion. By eliminating 14,000 jobs, the company expects to save $3 billion by the end of 2019. The cuts will be made over the next two years, with the majority of them expected to be made in the first few months of 2018.

As employees are losing their jobs, Teva said its board of directors is taking a 50 percent reduction in pay. The cut in pay for company directors was decided the same day the massive cuts were announced.

Teva’s restructuring doesn’t just include job cuts and closing of facilities. The company has also been in the midst of divesting itself of non-core assets. Earlier this month, Teva announced it completed the sale of a portfolio of products within its global women’s health business for $703 million in cash. The portfolio spans areas that include contraception, fertility, menopause and osteoporosis. In 2017, Teva sold its branded contraceptive line Paragard, a product within its global Women’s Health business, to CooperSurgical for $1.1 billion.

While the company struggles with its restructuring, this morning Teva said it is still facing challenges in the U.S. generic market and anticipates a further erosion of sales through 2018. That loss could result in a decline of about 18 percent to $18.3 billion. That’s about $1 billion less than analysts had forecast for 2018, Bloomberg reported.