Pharmaceuticals giant AstraZeneca, which has sites at Macclesfield and Alderley Park in Cheshire, said today that it will axe 7,300 jobs by the end of 2014 as part of a fresh round of cost savings.
The company, which has 61,000 staff globally of whom 8,000 are in the UK, axed 12,600 positions between 2007 and 2009 and removed another 9,000 roles by the end of last year.
It understood that between 250 and 350 jobs could go from the research and development department at Alderley Park, some 10 per cent of the total workforce of 3,000.
There has been no announcement regarding Macclesfield, the group's second largest manufacturing with around 2,600 staff.
Three hundred previously-announced job losses are due before 2015.
Alan Black, national officer for the GMB union said: "This is very disappointing and very worrying for the workers at Alderley Park.
"There's no doubt that the jobs are going. It's too early to say what action we'lll take.
"There was a concern there'd be a spin-off effect at Macclesfield but doesn't appear to be the case."
The company, which closed a site at Charnwood, near Loughborough, at the end of last year, said the latest restructuring was needed because of the weak economy and the impact of competition from generic drugs.
Its other sites in the UK are at Cambridge, Luton, Avlon near Bristol, Paddington in London, and Brixham in Devon.
The company has not yet officially disclosed where the jobs will go.
David Brennan, chief excutive, said: "While the further expected losses of market exclusivity make for a challenging 2012 outlook, we remain committed to a long-term, focused, R&D based strategy, and today we have announced further steps to drive productivity in all areas to improve returns on our investment in innovation."
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Two billion dollar profit last year but that's not enough, so get rid of staff to keep the share holders happy. Greed over jobs. Something morally wrong when a pharmaceutical company doesn't think 2 billion profit is not enough.
Global corporations are deserting the West to definately relocate to Asia, if this continues what are our economies plans for the future. Most definately the UK will be hit the hardest in the % to ration of job losses, the reason being is The UK is 'open for business' and that means easy to make redundancies here because our Govts won't protect jobs, the Unions are smashed and the Great British mentality of no protesting, just put up and shut up.
Sadly, the people at the bottom of our society have had no future for many years in relation to work, other than the service industry (which is now shrinking e.g. Retail Senior Management in Mcr are now being laid off and moving senior staff from London into our stores) and now the 'Intelligencer' are losing their opportunities.
great
hardly Manchester News
Cost cutting - a few jobs in the UK mean nothing to a bean counter overseas. Should the government step in - no point as there is nothing they can do and the unions are as toothless as a 17 year old alsatian - plenty of bark but no bite. Let's face it - the majority of big employers in the UK (other than the civil service) have overseas owners and we shouldn't be too suprised in the event that they 'need' to make savings they look to their foreign facilities for head count reduction. That's the way it works unfortunately - they'll ship it out to an emerging economy for a fraction of the operational cost, I do hope whoever this directly affects gets a nice redundancy pay off out of them.
This has been coming for years. I set up a conference there in '08 and they were told to buck up then. One guy had been there for 6 years and none of his research had passed the next level of testing. So i assume that R&D is very expensive.
ICi split up sold off chemicals to concentrate on pharma so did Ciba geigy and others. Now Pharma has proved so difficult, perhaps they should niot have been in such a rush to ditch chemicals. Same has happened with oil most sold their refineries,now they are going bust.
They can get the same work done in Asia you see...
There were some people who thought it was only unskilled workers who could have their jobs stolen.