The 250 staff to go at Wyeth can blame their departures on what the company calls "a decline in demand", writes Una McCaffrey
Wyeth is one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, with the 250 jobs to be lost at Newbridge, Co Kildare paling beside the 52,000 employees the company has across more than 100 countries.
The New Jersey-based firm has had a presence in the Republic since 1974, when it was known as American Home Products, a specialist in infant formula.
More recently, the firm has made its Irish name by establishing the world's biggest biotechnology campus in Grange Castle at Clondalkin in Dublin.
This operation, which represents a €1.8 billion investment by the company, employs 1,200 staff making drugs such as the rheumatoid arthritis treatment, Enbrel, and Prevnar, a pneumococcal vaccination for children.
Despite its high profile, the Grange Castle facility remained, until yesterday, Wyeth's second-largest Irish business by staff numbers, with the firm's Wyeth Medica business at Newbridge in Co Kildare employing 1,400 people.
It is this company that is set to simultaneously shed 250 jobs and witness a dramatic €350 million expansion.
This will see Newbridge become one of Wyeth's two "global strategic sites" for pharmaceutical products.
This means that as well as continuing to make capsules for women's health and central nervous system complaints, Newbridge will produce Wyeth's most advanced new products over the next five years.
This process will be highly automated and will thus not require an increase in overall staff numbers. The other Wyeth site to fulfil the same role is in Puerto Rico.
At Newbridge, meanwhile, the staff to be shed can blame their job losses on what Wyeth calls "a decline in demand" for some of the products they make at the moment.
It is thought this falling demand relates particularly to hormone replacement therapies and oral contraceptives.
Competition from cheaper, generic drugs has driven down the prices of branded products in these areas, while changing consumer tastes have also hit sales.
When the 250 staff slated for departure have left Wyeth, the company will still employ about 3,000 people in the Republic.
"We're hugely committed," said a spokesman for the company yesterday.
His words echoed a statement made by Bob Essner, Wyeth chief executive, when he visited Grange Castle last year.
"We have a good home in Ireland and as the company expands, I would expect that our presence in Ireland would expand with it," he said.
Wyeth's other facilities in the Republic comprise an animal vaccine operation that employs about 90 people in Sligo and a sales and marketing business that has about 70 staff in Walkinstown, Dublin.