Swiss newspapers full of rumours that tomorrow (Tuesday) will be an announcement

What? No link? Very unlike you.

German: https://www.blick.ch/news/wirtschaft...id8883452.html

Getting the same info from 'the horses mouth'.

Tomorrow at 8am the big announcement commences.

Novartis Business Services (NBS) - 700 going from Basel over 4 years.

Impacted to know by December.

2000 overall from Switzerland !

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/pharma_...-2020/44423572

Same shit, different day, really.

They'll probably do what they've always done in the past from what I remember: rehire them all on external contracts. After all, this has nothing to do with money, let alone profitability (lol), but just with saving a few headcounts...

It's a shame that the CHF remains so high v $/£/€. This is presumably one of the unfortunate consequences.

There was the usual 'headwinds, margins, market forces' etc etc bandied about.

But also, strategically, the remote sites do lack management, it's 'all' in Basel, so this distribution of managers/leaders out to them makes sense.
These guys are quite expensive in CH for sure, probably each one costing a min of CHF 300k here.

Not that anyone from Basel will end up there of course. Expat deals are gone, no-one will go on local contract.

Where Novartis leads, others will follow....

what is the purpose of that? i mean contractors (afaik) cost way more than
fulltime employees, no?

No.

Contractors cost essentially what you pay them, per hour/day.

Employees cost what you pay them plus sick leave plus holidays plus pension contributions plus all the other social charges plus training plus permanent office space plus plus plus.

Of course contractors are more expensive. But money's not the problem.

Lower headcount = profitability measures appear better. If you achieve a net income of let's say 10bn$ with 100'000 people, that looks much better than achieving the same with 120'000 people.

So they fake it all over the place. But that's in no way unique to Novartis.

It's always under the umbrella of "increased efficiency", but that's hardly ever what it's really about. That said, there are glaring inefficiencies at Novartis and elsewhere, and that products go and new ones come in, requiring different skills, is nothing new. Granted, a good organization realizes that well in advance and invests in their people to learn whatever new skills are required...

So I read, they keep R&D here and may create a cell and gene therapy production site adding 450 people. No idea what that is by the way, produce genes?

It's a form of therapy where a person's own cells are modified in some way to then fight certain diseases, particularly some cancers.

And that definitely has the potential to revolutionize the world of medicine. If done well.

Manufacturing is complex and comes at a massive cost as it's essentially individually tailored treatment. Needless to say that requires a whole different skill set than mass production of a standard pill.

Levi's or Diesel probably

so the workplace, laptop, infrastructure etc for a contractor come for free?

it's mainly FTE vs non-FTE, especially in Switzerland where a contract can easily be terminated by the employer.

It's easy. If the share price is too low, announce staff reductions. Share price goes up.

https://www.six-group.com/exchanges/...0012005267CHF4

The lower the headcount the higher the bonuses. Haven't lowered any costs but looks good to the shareholders.

Thanks but that sounds a bit SF to me. The 450 people may be employed in R&D and not in production.

It's already researched and developed for certain diseases, so yes, the 450 people will be employed in production.


Jup and that's the absurdity of it

Shareholders don't care about the no of employee's, just total employment cost, so unless the reduction in staff produced higher profits they would ignore it completely.