Swiss-American drugmaker Novartis announced this week its plans to let go of up to 400 employees from its Dublin sites over the next two years.
In a statement shared with Irish news organizations, the company explained that it will spend the next two years restructuring its global business in order to attempt to save roughly $1 billion in costs, opting to let go of more workers than previously reported.
It’s been a busy year for Novartis. The recent announcement comes a few months after an initial restructuring notice. Back in June, Novartis unveiled a restructuring plan that could lead to 8,000 jobs being cut, or roughly 7.4% of its global workforce. At the time, the Novartis spokesperson spoke with a Swiss newspaper and explained that the details regarding the job cuts were too premature to give specific figures.
Then in July, the drugmaker bought a priority review voucher for $100M from Mallinckrodt. Most recently, after months of speculation, the company confirmed that it would be separating Sandoz — its generics and biosimilars division — into its own standalone company, creating Europe’s largest generics company.
Just last month, Novartis revealed that it would be investing $400 million to grow its biologics portfolio. In the press release, they outlined that $100 million would go toward a biologics hub in the Novartis St. Johann campus, $110 to a new biocampus in Mengeš, Slovenia for clinical manufacturing capabilities (both cGMP and non cGMP), and roughly $60 million would be used to develop manufacturing capabilities in its Schaftenau campus in Austria.