December 8, 2014
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
Swiss-based Novartis is laying off up to 200 people at its U.S. headquarters in East Hanover, N.J. The layoffs are apparently related to overall restructuring the company announced in October of this year.
The individuals losing their jobs will be offered severance, outplacement guidance and the chance to apply for open positions. “We do not take these decisions lightly,” said company spokeswoman Julie Masow in a statement, “but do believe they are necessary to ensure we better serve the needs of our patients and customers and position our U.S. General Medicines business for long-term success.”
In October the company announced that three of its division heads were leaving the company as the result of a deal with GlaxoSmithKline and Eli Lilly and Company . That deal was originally announced in April. Eli Lilly, headquartered in Indianapolis, agreed to purchase Novartis Animal Health for about $5.4 billion. It will be merged into Lilly’s animal health business, Elanco.
At about the same time, in April, Novartis and GSK inked an agreement to develop a new consumer health business. Novartis bought GSK’s oncology product lines for $14.5 billion, in addition to $1.5 billion potential milestone payments. GSK agreed to pay $7.1 billion in royalties for Novartis’s vaccines business, minus its flu vaccines.
All this restructuring was described by Novartis CEO Joe Jiminez in a Reuters article as making the company “fighting fit” to meet the next ten years of changes and challenges. The realignment also moves GSK out of the cancer drug market.
Part of the realignment also includes creating what the company refers to as a cardiovascular field force. “However, our anticipated needs in heart failure do not line up exactly with our previous needs in primary care, so some positions are being eliminated,” Masow said in a statement. “We will reduce 243 field force positions that will not be part of the new cardiovascular field force. Approximately 18 percent of the reduction has been achieved through vacancy management and other efforts to lessen the impact on people to approximately 200 associates.”
In September the company announced it was laying off 83 people in its Suffern, N.Y. facility. This was part of a two- to three-year facility closing expected to finish in 2016. The first phase laid off about 200 people. The second phase affected 83. In total that shutdown is expected to affect 525 employees.
