Healthy Skepticism Library item: 7793
Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.
Publication type: news
Ritter S.
Workers At Pfizer Await Fate
TheDay.com (Connecticut) 2007 Jan 22
http://www.theday.com/re.aspx?re=e8208bc8-7f51-41e6-a45a-6f6a005e7492
Full text:
The wait for worried Pfizer Inc. employees will end early this afternoon when Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Kindler lays out his vision for a leaner, more nimble company, a strategy that’s likely to include substantial layoffs in an effort to cut costs.
The world’s largest drug maker will release its fourth-quarter and year-end results before the market opens this morning. At 1 p.m., Kindler is scheduled to offer his plan to overhaul the company to a gathering of Wall Street analysts in New York.
Some analysts are predicting the plan could call for as much as $2 billion in cost cuts, including the shuttering of some plants. Jobs are also on the line, with one analyst predicting Pfizer’s 100,000-member global workforce could be slashed by 8 to 10 percent.
Local elected officials said Sunday evening that they haven’t yet been told of Pfizer’s plans for its Groton and New London campuses, where about 5,000 people work. Meetings are scheduled with Pfizer researchers, managers, manufacturing workers and other employees ahead of the 1 p.m. announcement.
“People are waiting,” Pfizer spokeswoman Liz Power said Sunday night. “People are anxious to hear not only how they themselves might be impacted, they’re also anxious to hear about what direction the company is going.”
In the meantime, Internet message boards were rife with rumors Sunday of where the job cuts would be. A Web site called www.biofind.com contained hundreds of postings in a section called “Rumor Mill,” where employees debated the various strengths and weaknesses of different Pfizer facilities around the world.
Some speculated that Pfizer’s La Jolla, Calif., campus could be closed. Others suggested that its Nagoya, Japan, or Sandwich, England, facilities could fall to budget cuts.
“Trying to decide if I’d rather be Pfired or retained!,” read one posting. “Going through this every year or two is no way to live.”
A Sandwich employee on Sunday wrote: “This is it then. Tomorrow we go to work and the whole morning we will pretend it is business as usual. And at the end of the day we get to know what will happen to our jobs.”
Kindler, who took the top job in July, has his work cut out for him. Wall Street is looking not only for significant cost savings, but also for plans to boost revenue to make up for the loss of about $14 billion in annual sales from several drugs that are losing patent protection.
The company’s biggest selling drug, the $13 billion cholesterol fighter Lipitor, faces the prospects of generic competition in 2011. In December, the company halted development of promising cholesterol drug, torcetrapib, that had been touted as its next blockbuster.
Still, the drug maker is flush with cash, estimating it has about $34 billion to work with over the next couple of years. A big chunk of that could be used to acquire or partner with smaller pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to bolster its drug pipeline.
Analysts say Kindler may announce cuts of $2 billion, which would come on top of a 2005 initiative aimed at trimming $4 billion in annual spending over the next several years. Plans to shutter the Groton manufacturing plant, which employed 300, are part of that earlier restructuring.
In November, the company announced plans to reduce its U.S. sales force by 20 percent, or 2,200 jobs. Some employees think further sales cuts are possible.
Kindler’s 1 p.m. presentation will be Webcast at www.pfizer.com. Visitors should click on the “Quarterly Corporate Performance – Fourth Quarter 2006” link.
