The French pharmaceutical group Sanofi has announced to the works council its intention to present an Employment Regulation File (ERE) in its Spanish subsidiary that will affect 89 people, of the 1,450 that make up the group’s workforce in Spain.
The group indicates that it undertakes the reduction of employment “in order to adapt the structure and operation to the current and future needs of the sector, ensuring its competitiveness and future viability.”
At a global level, Sanofi closed last year with flat sales of 43,070 million euros and a slight drop in profits, to 10,155 million euros, and announced similar prospects for this year. To improve its income statement, in recent months it has announced layoffs in France, the United States and Belgium, among other countries.
The company, which is now opening a negotiating process with the unions, justifies the ERE for organizational and productive reasons, and points out that the layoffs will mainly affect its biopharma business units and the corporate functions of central services. Therefore, the adjustment will have a significant impact in Barcelona, where the corporate headquarters is located.
As the group explained in a statement, the firm wishes to undertake a “modernization and simplification of internal processes” and “the reorganization and prioritization of therapeutic areas”, structural changes that generate a surplus of staff. Likewise, the company is going to reorganize its therapeutic areas, changing those it considers priorities, and the commercial activity of the subsidiary in Spain.
The layoffs will not affect the plant that the group has in Riells i Viabrea (Girona), in which it has invested more than 50 million euros in recent years and which has more than 300 workers.
The pharmaceutical company also has the financial and supply management unit of the entire group in Barcelona, as the axis of the Global Innovation Center (GIC) in which it employs 400 people of 40 different nationalities, which will not be affected either.