Bayer’s transformation under CEO Bill Anderson has picked up momentum. In reporting second-quarter earnings on Tuesday, the company revealed it has cut 3,200 jobs since the start of this year.
That number includes the 1,500 staffers the company said it laid off in the first quarter. The reductions bring Bayer’s headcount to approximately 96,500—down from the 101,369 employees the company counted at the end of 2022.
The downsizing is part of Bayer’s major reorganization, dubbed “dynamic shared ownership,” which was designed by Anderson to reduce levels of bureaucracy at the struggling conglomerate. Bayer started the year $34.5 billion in debt and revealed a plan in February to slash investor dividends to the legal minimum over the next three years.
In March, Anderson dismantled the leadership team of Bayer’s pharma sector, reducing it from 14 to eight executives. Three members of the executive team were let go, while the three others were demoted. In January, Bayer executed a similar overhaul of its crop science sector, dismissing three execs, each with at least 27 years of experience at the company.
Of the 1,500 cuts in the first quarter, roughly two-thirds were managerial jobs. Layoffs will continue into 2025, the company has said, with the goal to save the company 500 million euros ($541 million) in operating expenses this year and 2 billion euros ($2.16 billion) in 2026.
Last week, a New Jersey Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) revealed that Bayer was cutting 70 staffers at its U.S. headquarters in Whippany, with those reductions effective Oct. 25. That came on top of the company handing pink slips to 90 employees at the same facility four months earlier.
Along with the news on the job cuts, Bayer reported lots of positives—especially in its pharma sector which adjusted its annual sales projection window from a decline of 2% at midpoint to a gain of 1.5% at midpoint.
“All three of our businesses now have an organizational blueprint that’s leaner, less hierarchical, more focused on customers and products—and we’ll continually improve toward that standard, with the goal of orienting everything around our mission,” Anderson said on Tuesday.
Bayer is still digging out from its disastrous $63 billion acquisition of Monsanto in 2018, which brought with it legal claims, now numbering in the tens of thousands, that the weedkiller Roundup causes cancer.
By Kevin Dunleavy
Source: fiercepharma.com
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