Novartis to Cut 680 Jobs across The United States and Switzerland

Swiss innovative medicine company, Novartis, is planning to cut around 680 jobs in its development organization unit which helps to bring its drug to the market. Making the statement on Tuesday, the company said that around 240 jobs would be cut in the United States and up to 440 in Switzerland. The redundancies will be made over the next two to three years.

“Novartis is today communicating plans to evolve our global Development organization, with the intent to drive sustainable, leading R&D performance and bring meaningful medicines to patients even faster,” said the company’s spokesperson in a statement sent to Fierce Pharma.

“As we invest across the company to maximize the value of our robust portfolio and advanced technology platforms, a set of changes to build future capabilities and access global talent pools will be implemented over the next 2 to 3 years, with parallel build-up and reduction of roles in certain locations.”

The layoff announcement is different from a restructuring program which will likely see 8,000 of Novartis’ global workforce leave the company. Earlier this year, Novartis’ Swiss rival drugmaker Roche announced that it was laying off 345 employees in product development.

At the moment, Novartis has around 12,500 employees in its development sector which includes analytics, drug regulations, and support functions like quality assurance. The employees in this sector are also involved in designing the production process for drugs after the completion of the research work.

It is estimated that around 3,000 of the roles are in Switzerland while the United States has around 2,000. The layoff announcement means that around 14% of the roles in the respective countries will be affected.

Novartis plans to add new roles over the same period

The net job loss in Novartis will be smaller than the announced layoffs over the next two to three years. The reason is that the company plans to add roles over the same period. At the end of the layoffs, the estimated net job losses globally will be 1-2%.

According to Novartis, the changes are designed to reshape the company’s capabilities to access local talent, including regulation specialists and data scientists in Britain. The Swiss drugmaker reiterated its commitment to development work in the United States and Switzerland.

“We remain committed to development in Switzerland as our innovation hub for complex development and providing strategic leadership as the global headquarters for development,” said the company’s spokesperson.

“The US remains a key development hub with strong representation in our global program teams, responsible for advancing our medicines pipeline.”

In September 2023, Novartis reorganized its strategy which led to the rearrangement of its operations into five units, including development. The unit helps in the creation of promising new medications and also assists in getting the drug approved by regulators.