UP TO 785 people will lose their jobs after pharmaceuticals group Pfizer announced a fundamental restructuring of its manufacturing business yesterday 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.
Speaking in Madrid last night where he was attending an EU/Latin America summit, Taoiseach Brian Cowen described the news as “very regrettable”.
He said the losses were not unexpected after Pfizer’s $68 billion purchase of Wyeth last year. He believed the cuts were unavoidable. “They have been looking at their own global strategy and this is having an impact in Ireland.”
But he described the pharmaceutical sector as “a growth area” and said he was confident that replacement jobs would be found.
Dr Paul Duffy, head of manufacturing for Pfizer in Ireland, said senior Government Ministers had been in touch with Pfizer executives in the United States, but there was “not much a government could do when global decisions were being taken”.
The company 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.
Any sale could save some of the jobs at those operations. 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.
Yesterday, Nat Ricciardi, global manufacturing president, said the plant restructuring was “critical to our efforts to remain competitive”.
“We are keenly aware of the impact these types of changes have on employees and their families,” he said.
“We will provide support to our colleagues who lose their jobs so that their transition to new careers is as smooth as possible,” he added.
Minister for Enterprise Batt O’Keeffe said last night that the news was “devastating” for workers.
He said the Government would provide training and re-employment services to the 275 workers losing their jobs in Newbridge and would also work with Pfizer Global Manufacturing to try to save the other 510 jobs at risk.
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”.
Dr Duffy said Ireland would continue to provide centres of excellence for Pfizer in various areas and would continue to be a significant supplier to company’s global network..
