The pharmaceutical industry employs hundreds of thousands in the U.S. alone. Yet it's also no stranger to layoffs.
Clinical failures can shelve a once-promising candidate and leave scientists without jobs. Marketed products may become less profitable and therefore warrant fewer sales representatives for promotion. Recently, pharmas have been keen on consolidating their businesses around core therapeutic areas to improve productivity and focus R&D investment.
In the first quarter, Bayer said about 200 jobs would be lost with the closure of an Indiana logistics center. Roughly the same number of positions are getting culled at the California offices of AbbVie's Stemcentrx. And in Colorado, AstraZeneca laid off 210 workers across a pair of manufacturing sites.
With so much consolidation happening, BioPharma Dive decided to track the industry's biggest layoffs. We identified around 35 since the start of 2018, amounting to thousands of jobs lost. While the industry is also creating new roles, more layoffs are on the way as large employers like Bayer, Pfizer and Teva continue to trim their workforces.
Above, we've created a map to help visualize where these job cuts are happening. Many were in historic hubs for drugmaking such as the northeastern U.S. and western Europe. To be included in the map, the cuts had to affect at least 10% of a company's overall workforce or impact more than 100 employees.
If companies gave details about which facilities or roles the layoffs pertained to, we included that information. For example, a January 2018 WARN notice from Teva listed more than 200 layoffs across three sites in Pennsylvania, so our map shows how many jobs were lost at each site. If no information was available, layoffs are pinned to the company's global or regional headquarters.
Notably, our map shows only companies with a market cap of at least $2 billion leading up to their respective layoffs.
This is a living tracker we plan to update at the end of each quarter.