As we were wrapping up our annual July vacation, we were shocked to hear about the magnitude of job cuts at Merck. This is on top of the 11,500 jobs Merck cut last year. Even worse, Merck apparently intends to trim headcount to their pre-Shering-Plough days, which translates into (roughly) an additional 41,000 jobs (91,000 currently – 53,000 at time of Schering Plough merger).
Astounding.
It begs to question whether other companies, such as GSK, are far behind in announcing major job cuts and shifts towards emerging markets?
We hope that many of these former employees manage to exit with out-licensed, underdeveloped assets from Merck. We suspect that Merck, as with many other companies, have interesting molecules for smaller markets that could be developed by smaller companies…at a lower cost than what a megasized company could.