Dive Brief:
- Allergan will lay off 577 workers in its Irvine, CA location, its headquarters, starting on June 4, FiercePharma reports.
- Actavis completed its $66 billion Allergan acquisition in March after a long period last year during which Allergan was fighting off a hostile bid from Valeant. The new company is now known simply as Allergan.
- So far, Allergan has laid off or (or planned to lay off) more than 1,000 workers in Irvine.
Dive Insight:
During the height of the Valeant crisis, Valeant looked like a mean, heartless lay-off, cost-cutting machine, with plans to buy Allergan and slash $2.8 billion in annual costs, with 80% of those cuts occurring in the first six months post-merger.
Even the former Allergan CEO, David Pyott, had plans to lay off workers in order to cut costs, with the stated goal of saving $475 million in 2015 by cutting 1,500 workers. As it turns out, Allergan (Actavis) is aggressively using planned lay-offs to cut costs, which leads one to believe that perhaps there is a great deal of redundancy at Allergan that needs to be reconciled.