The layoffs will affect employees at Pfizer’s Bothell, Washington site, which previously served as the headquarters for Seagen before being acquired by the pharma for $43 billion.
A hundred jobs at Pfizer’s Bothell, Washington site are on the chopping block amid the Big Pharma’s aggressive cost cutting measures. The layoffs were noted in a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) notice and began Aug. 25.
In a statement to Fierce Pharma on Tuesday, a spokesperson for Pfizer said that the retrenchment effort is part of the company’s push to improve “R&D productivity and efficiency with a sharpened focus on opportunities.” The pharma is also “simplifying the way it works through digital enablement and automation, which we believe will deliver the greatest impact for patients,” the spokesperson added.
This latest round of workforce reduction at Pfizer comes about two years after it acquired Seagen for $43 billion in May 2023. The antibody-drug conjugate specialist was previously headquartered at the Bothell site, which also housed a manufacturing facility for its biologics products, as well as leased spaces for R&D and general administrative spaces, according to a 2022 annual report.
Just months after the Seagen buy, in October that same year, Pfizer launched a $3.5-billion cost-cutting initiative, an effort that the pharma said at the time would involve a workforce reduction, though it did not specify how many employees would be impacted. The first casualties of this savings push came just weeks later, when 200 people at a facility in Kalamazoo, Michigan received their pink slips. A spokesperson at the time attributed these layoffs to “the lower-than-expected utilization for our COVID-19 products” and the pharma’s “enterprise-wide cost realignment program.”
The layoffs continued in the succeeding days, including eliminating 100 jobs at Newbridge, Ireland and 500 at Kent, UK.
Then, in December 2023 Pfizer tacked on an additional $500 million to its savings target for 2024. A few months later, in May 2024, the pharma raised the cost-cutting bar by $1.5 billion to be completed by the end of 2027. In April this year, Pfizer added another $1.7 billion through 2027. The same month, the pharma laid off 56 employees from its San Diego site.
Amid this aggressive savings push, Pfizer came to be on the receiving end of an activist investor attack. In October 2024, Starboard Value carved out a $1 billion stake in the pharma after having lost faith in management. In a corporate presentation that month, Starboard blasted two of Pfizer’s big-ticket deals—Seagen and Global Blood Therapeutics—for which they allege the pharma “significantly overpaid.”
