The layoffs will take effect on July 22 and particularly target those working in sales, data engineering and product management.
AbbVie’s aesthetics arm Allergan is laying off 202 employees at its Irvine, California site, according to a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification update posted last week.
It is unclear how many full-time employees Allergan has—AbbVie does not report such figures in its annual filings—but there are around 2,100 associated members of the unit’s LinkedIn page. The workforce reduction will take effect on July 22 as per the WARN notice. In total, AbbVie had roughly 55,000 employees across more than 70 countries as of the end of 2024.
The Orange County Business Journal noted last week that most of the affected employees work remotely, with only 19 present onsite at the Irvine facility. The layoffs will involve sales employees, data engineers and product managers across many different divisions, as per the Journal.
The layoffs come after Allergan’s revamped loyalty program failed to return the results it had expected. In October 2024, Allergan lifted the veil on its Allē program, which gave out points and rewards to patients, which they could apply to legacy products such as Botox and Juvéderm. The goal was to encourage patients to get treated more often and build loyalty, benefiting providers.
The actual effect, however, fell far short of expectations, Carrie Strom, president of Global Allergan Aesthetics, said during AbbVie’s fourth-quarter and full-year earnings report in February. “Many [providers] felt the new construct was too complex to integrate into their practices, therefore negatively impacting market share and inventory levels,” she explained. AbbVie’s aesthetics sales took a 4.4% year-on-year hit, sliding to $1.3 billion in Q4 2024.
Allergan in February reverted to its original Allē loyalty program, which Strom said “has been met with rapid and favorable response from our providers.”
Beyond the marketing misstep, larger factors are applying pressure on Allergan’s business. During the investor call, Strom said that consumers, especially in the U.S., have been pulling back from cosmetic products due to high inflation. Juvéderm, a filler, was particularly affected by this pattern, with Q4 sales dropping 10% year-on-year in the country. U.S. sales in the fourth quarter slipped 5% year-on-year to $839 million.
Aside from Allergan, AbbVie’s broader business is also facing market pressures. Sales of its immunology blockbuster Humira, once the world’s best-selling drug, are in free-fall, due in large part to the entry of biosimilars, which have been seeing more success in drawing prescribers away from the branded product.
At the same time, following the back-to-back mid-stage failures of its schizophrenia asset emraclidine in November 2024, AbbVie in January was forced to pare down expectations for the drug. The pharma will still take the asset forward, but this time in combination with existing schizophrenia therapies.
