Restructuring Plan to Eliminiate 15,000 jobs

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Published Fri, Jul 09, 2010 04:35 AM
Modified Thu, Jul 08, 2010 09:31 PM
Merck cost-cutting brings closings
STAFF WRITER ALAN M. WOLF
Published in: Local/State
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Related ImagesAs Merck officials await regulatory approval to begin commercial production at a new vaccine plant in Durham, the company is cutting back other places.

Merck announced that it plans to close eight research labs and eight manufacturing plants worldwide. The closings are part of a broader cost-cutting effort following its $41 billion acquisition of rival Schering-Plough last year.

The restructuring also is tied to a plan to eliminate about 15,000 jobs, or 15 percent of Merck's work force.

Meanwhile, Merck expects to receive word this month from the Food and Drug Administration to begin selling vaccines made at its Durham facility. Two more phases of expansion at the plant are expected to be ready in 2012. The facility is expected to employ about 400 people by the end of this year.

Other big drugmakers, including Pfizer and Glaxo SmithKline, are scaling back operations amid increasing competition from generic medicines and slowing sales.

Merck will shut research labs in Cambridge, Mass., and in Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany and Scotland. The company will close manufacturing operations in Miami Lakes, Fla., and in Italy, Portugal, Mexico, Brazil and Singapore. After the site closings, Merck will have 16 major research facilities and 77 manufacturing plants.
 






























Anonymous said:
How many sales reps do we have in the U.S.?
Click to expand...

Less than in China according to the article from Fierce Pharma.


Chinese docs trade up to jobs in pharma sales
July 11, 2011 — 11:31am ET | By Tracy Staton



What's a low-paid Chinese doctor to do? Become a pharma rep. As Bloomberg reports, physicians in China are abandoning medical practice for jobs in drug sales, finding that they can better their $300-a-month doctors' salary by marketing drugs, rather than prescribing them. The human resources firm Aon predicts that as many as 14,000 Chinese doctors will join foreign drugmakers over the next 5 years.

Such is one unintended consequence of Big Pharma's Chinese gold rush. As drugmakers have laid off thousands of reps in the U.S. and Europe, they have been hiring big-time in emerging markets, especially China. The competition for drug reps in China is intense, too; turnover rates are high as major drugmakers such as Sanofi, Eli Lilly, Merck, and Bayer recruit one another's salespeople.


Needless to say, doctors are highly in demand because of their specialized knowledge. "In most other countries, it's extremely rare to get fully trained doctors as medical representatives," Chris Lee, managing director of Bayer Healthcare China, told the news service.

Losing doctors to the drug business could exacerbate an existing shortage of physicians. China has only one doctor per every 7,000 people, and the government has been offering incentives such as free training to attract more people into primary care. Doctors willing to work in villages can win even more perks, such as relocation fees.

It's all part of China's effort to revamp its healthcare system, the very effort that has experts predicting big growth in the Chinese drug market for years to come. That growth, of course, has foreign drugmakers salivating--and jockeying for their share. As Bloomberg notes, Aon predicts that foreign pharma's Chinese offices will hire at least 35,000 sales staff by the end of 2014. That would more than double their sales force, which amounted to 33,000 at the end of 2010.
 






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