Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Innovation Batt O’Keeffe said today the Government is hopeful that buyers can be found for two Pfizer plants which are scheduled to close.
Up to 785 people will lose their jobs in Ireland after the pharmaceuticals group yesterday announced a fundamental restructuring of its manufacturing business which will mean 6,000 job cuts worldwide.
The world’s largest drugmaker said it would close eight plants around the world, including three in Ireland. It is also reducing operations at six other plants, including Newbridge in Co Kildare where 275 jobs are to go between now and 2014.
The company said it will place the plants it is closing – at Dún Laoghaire in Dublin and at Loughbeg and Shanbally in Cork – on the market.
A spokesman for IDA Ireland said last night that it was hopeful that for at least two of the plants – on which Pfizer spent €430 million upgrading facilities in recent years – buyers could be found.
Speaking this morning, Mr O’Keeffe also said he was confident buyers for the two plants could be found.
“The jobs are going to be lost over a phased basis right up to 2014 and that gives an opportunity to the IDA in relation to the two plants that will be up for sale to try to find a buyer,” he said.
Mr O'Keefe told RTÉ radio's Morning Ireland that a confidence existed within the IDA that they can deliver substantially over the next two years.
Any sale could save some of the jobs at those operations, he said. A number of other staff may relocate to Pfizer’s biopharmaceuticals campus at Grange Castle in Clondalkin, Dublin, where 1,200 people are employed. The company signalled that it planned further capital investment and jobs there.
The job cuts had been signalled by Pfizer as far back as January last year when it first made its bid to acquire Wyeth.
The pharmaceutical giant said the first jobs to go would be towards the end of this year at Newbridge. However, the bulk of redundancies at the plant would occur in 2013 and some as late as 2014.
Operations at the two Cork plants are expected to cease in 2012 and 2013, with work at Dún Laoghaire being phased out between 2011 and 2014.
The company said the Loughbeg plant was involved solely in the production of the group’s blockbuster cholesterol drug Lipitor, on which patents expire in 2011 which will reduce demand.
New product lines that had been anticipated at Dún Laoghaire had failed to make it through clinical trials while the Shanbally plant, opened only in 2009, was effectively competing with the larger Grange Castle site for work.
A further 650 workers at the company’s nutritionals plant in Askeaton, Limerick, must await the outcome of a separate review starting later this year. However, a spokeswoman for the company said that nutritionals was a growing business for Pfizer and there was a “need for capacity in the network”.